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Culture/cultivation: thoughts on painting the landscape
Art Journal, Winter, 1998 by Altoon Sultan
In all this work, I aim to present the object in a convincing and straightforward manner. Touch is reserved; there is no romanticization of paint or painter. No heroes - my job is to show what I see and know as clearly as possible, just as the dairyman's is to produce milk. If the painting transcends the specificity and ordinariness of its subject, this transcendence is a byproduct of the painting process and of my intense engagement with the things of this world.
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I've been thinking of Charles Sheeler lately, because of his involvement in industrial imagery. He portrayed the industry in his work as a positive force for humankind; in the thirties, the ambiguous nature of technology was not yet clear. Sheeler's dramatic vision is enhanced by a keen interest in abstraction. (He was a great fan of early Duchamp.) I find his most interesting work to be that in which the tension between realism and abstraction is most acute.
It is toward this place of tension that I've been trying to move my work recently. The paintings have their political subtext, but on the surface are the aesthetic issues. My love of abstraction, especially Minimalism, is informing this direction. (If I came back in another painting life, I'd like to be a Minimalist painter. There's a similarity between Minimalism and realism in their discipline and rigor, but Minimalism slices through to a base-line truth - a truth that's harder to achieve with my messier view of reality.) The bulky things in my pictures are shapes and forms, movements of color and light. The objects are at times so strange that their function is difficult to identify. So, we're left with their abstract qualities, which is a good thing - because painting is, at heart, an abstract and sensual activity.
1. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995), 7.
2. J. B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 8.
3. Ann Jensen Adams, "Competing Communities in the 'Great Bog of Europe': Identity and Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting," in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
4. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830-1865 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).
5. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 20.
Altoon Sultan lives in Vermont, where she paints, gardens, and rides horses. She teaches here and there, most recently as professional-in-residence at Louisiana State University. She is currently working on an instructional book on egg tempera painting.
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