Culture/cultivation: thoughts on painting the landscape

Altoon Sultan

Occasionally here in Vermont there are glorious early fall days - clear and mild, the air as moist as in summer. I abandon the studio to walk in the woods with my dog. I gather fallen apples from the orchard and pick tomatoes. The harvesting chores are demanding at this time of the year - canning, freezing, filling the root cellar. On the easel in my studio is a large painting of bright yellow plastic tubing coiled up on a rusty red cart. This is farming equipment used for draining wet fields. (As I was driving through the Midwest on a painting trip a couple of years ago, that yellow plastic screamed at me across the fiat terrain of Ohio, the site of a prehistoric sea.) Finished paintings on the studio walls limn fertilizer tanks, tractors, silage bunkers. While living a pastoral idyll, I paint images that confront the industrial present of agriculture.

My painting life began the other way round. I'm a Brooklyn kid, born and bred; I earned both my college and graduate school degrees at Brooklyn College. During my graduate painting studies, I moved to the Lower East Side, from which my family had escaped during the twenties, where I lived for twenty years. Throughout this time, come summer, I'd rent a house in the "country" - Long Island, upstate New York - and paint en plein air. At the beginning of my career, my focus was on Victorian architecture. That focus gradually enlarged to include landscape. I would paint outdoors day after day - bundled up against the cold, smeared with bug repellent, wearing a huge hat for protection from glare. Since light was an important element in my work, and light changed over the course of the day, each summer I would begin several paintings and complete them over a period of three or four months: a painting for sunny mornings and one for cloudy mornings, the same for afternoons. Hazy light, because of the softness of its shadows, also required a different painting.

There is an intensity of vision only possible when looking at the same scene over a long period of time. The painting process is akin to a meditative practice. I felt an expansiveness of spirit while working concentratedly on the motif. For me the landscape was a place of refuge, as it is for so many city dwellers who are looking for air, space, and light to expand their spirits, seeing this place as less manipulated by human agency.

An articulation of this feeling (though somewhat extravagant for my taste) comes from the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote, "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." Nineteenth-century painters also embraced this spiritual attitude. Luminism, a mode that includes some of my favorite landscape paintings, embodies a selfless spirituality. The all-enveloping light, calm horizontal structure, and lack of touch in the paintings of Martin Johnson Heade, Fitz Hugh Lane, and John Frederick Kensett give their work a transcendent quality. Nature is seen as an aspect of God. I find the ordinary subject matter and reticence of this work more appealing than the similarly spiritually seeking but more grandiose paintings that invoke the awe-inspiring sublime.

My pragmatic, down-to-earth nature - the sensibility that causes me to prefer Lane over Albert Bierstadt - makes me uncomfortable with talk of spirituality and has forced me to see the wrongheadedhess of pastoral romance. The views I so admired, spreading out alongside vernacular architecture, were formed by the hard labor of husbandmen over many years. Even wilderness has not escaped human intervention: forests have been cut and roads built through them, the frozen wastes of Antarctica have been probed, and Mt. Everest is littered with old oxygen canisters. As Simon Schama states, "it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have."(1) The dictionary definition of landscape, "a stretch of country as seen from a single point," implies a viewer, someone who organizes the infinite detail seen. J. B. Jackson, a pioneer in landscape studies, prefers to define the word as "a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence."(2)

This definition acknowledges the origin of the word landscape. The German Landschaft meant a small unit of human habitation - houses and fields. By the time landskip got to England in the seventeenth century, via Dutch paintings, it meant a picture of scenery. Philips Koninck's sweeping views, Jakob van Ruisdael's bleaching fields, Paulus Potter's animals, Aelbert Cuyp's golden views with cows are what I'd thought of as the first pure landscapes, devoid of moralizing narratives.

The meaning of these landscapes did not reside solely in the visual pleasure of sky, land, and human enterprise, as I learned several years ago from Ann Jensen Adams's essay on Dutch landscape painting.(3) In the seventeenth century, the Nederlands (Lowlands) was newly independent, with many new immigrants, and its prosperity enabled it to undertake massive land reclamation projects. Wetlands were drained at great expense, creating thousands of acres of new land. The Nederlands did not have a king or queen whose person embodied the state. So, views of the land that was wrested with such difficulty from the sea expressed the identity of this new nation. The Dutch cow, fatuously productive and important in commerce, was also seen as a symbol of Holland. In a like manner, Bierstadt's and Thomas Moran's grand paintings of the West present the newly enlarged nation and support the doctrine of Manifest Destiny.(4)

Reading these new historical perspectives made me think differently about painting the landscape, as did looking at postmodern art. I've always enjoyed looking at all kinds of art for the aesthetic pleasures and intellectual challenges it gives. Gerhard Richter's Atlas presented the world - ordinary life, political events, portraits, and places - in thousands of photographs. In this work, landscape punctuated the flow of images and questioned our longings and how we choose to represent them. With the text accompanying photographs of gorgeous landscape, Carrie Mae Weems confounds our expectation of the landscape's meaning. The violent history of a place is in disturbing contrast to its beauty.

I had been trained in the "you paint what you see" school of thought, where formal issues such as composition and color were important and content wasn't talked about much. The complex layers of meaning disclosed in much new historical writing and contemporary art challenged my project of simple pastoral farming scenes that showed the harmony of man's work in nature. What I saw was now not so simple.

My interest in the agricultural landscape has continued, however, as the place where actual landscape is constantly being made and changed - where the conventional beauty of undulating fields framed by tree-covered hills coexists with raw power in the guise of farm machines; where unnatural nature (scientifically bred cows, hybrid crops) is raised with chemicals and helped along by mounds of plastic. A major reason that I'm such an avid gardener is that I've seen the way our food is grown in California, with artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides.

For Americans, farmers, along with cowboys, have been mythic figures, our "rugged individualists." But now the number of farmers is statistically insignificant, whereas when the country began, they constituted 95 percent of the population. The small family farm is now an anomaly, and large agribusinesses are the norm. Our food supply is cheap and plentiful, but at what cost to our health, soil, and water?

When I look at a farm now, all these thoughts are bumping around in my head, motivating my work - but then there's the reality of the actual stuff in front of me. And this stuff - the silos, manure piles, plastic-wrapped hay, machinery - is exciting in its monumentality and sculptural presence. The ordinary ugliness of a tractor or a mound of old tires is weirdly beautiful. I'm more and more drawn to these things in the foreground, so that at times I can hardly call myself a landscape painter.

And I'm no longer primarily a plein-air painter. Now, most of my work is done in the studio. A primary reason is that the objects that confront me, that I place smack up against the picture plane, are transient in the landscape - machinery is moved, hay is piled up and taken away, animals wander about. It became impossible to paint directly from the motif when the motif didn't sit still for three or four months.

Another reason seems to be my move to Vermont four years ago. I bought my hilltop farmhouse during the euphoria of the mid-eighties, afterward finding that I couldn't afford it while continuing to live in New York. I took a teaching job in San Jose, California. Feeling a cultural exile there, I quit the job after three years, sold my New York loft, and moved to Vermont in 1994. Here, my work in the studio and my life are more unified. I have friends who are farmers, I'm on the town Planning Commission, and I'm the Solid Waste Supervisor (which basically means running the recycling center). An advantage of doing representational work in a small town is that my neighbors relate to and enjoy it. I'm always inside the beauty of the landscape, so my need to be outdoors painting has diminished.

Working in the studio has allowed me to travel, collecting images of agriculture from around the country. Changes in topography and weather create conditions for different kinds of crops - soybeans in Iowa, sugar cane in Louisiana - which in turn need different implements for their cultivation. It's exciting to deal with this variety of subject matter.

Then there's the freedom from naturalism that comes from studio work. I feel myself to be solidly in the American tradition of what Barbara Novak describes as conceptual realism: "abstract knowledge is fortified by the stuff of empiricism . . . . the object, as it were, presents itself, and the result is a higher coefficient of reality, making the real somehow more real."(5) At times I feel like a primitive, trying to make the things I paint tangible. The thrill of the working process comes from this conjuring up of the real.

About ten years ago, I began to make landscape paintings in the studio during my winters in New York. I'd had enough experience in working directly from the motif to complete a painting using color studies and black-and-white photographs done at the site. For the past two years, I have worked exclusively this way. When I find an interesting image, I set up my easel and paint a small color sketch in oil or, since last summer, in gouache. (Gouache gives a crisper and more luminous study.) At the same time, I take black-and-white photographs of the scene. The photographs become my notations of detail, and the painted studies describe color, light, and air. I do not use color film because I want my color sense and memory to have precedence over chemical color. And why not simply take photographs instead of painting? Painting is in my blood - I take deep sensual pleasure in it.

Certain images have the structure of simple large-scale forms that translate into large oil paintings; other images become small egg temperas. This choice is pretty much gut instinct, though. The different body relationships that I and the viewer have to these large- or intimate-sized works interests me. They require a different physical activity in their making; the oils, though precise, are more gestural, while the egg temperas are painstaking and meditative.

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.

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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