By Annette Hinkle
At this weekend’s ArtHamptons art fair in Bridgehampton, Sag Harbor artist Donald Sultan will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award. As part of the art fair, The Mary Ryan Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Sultan’s large-scale paintings, drawings and prints.
This week, Sultan sat down to talk about his art, the business and his love for Sag Harbor…
Though your painting is distinctly contemporary, your subjects often include traditional objects like flowers and fruit. Tell me about the use of still life imagery in your work. Where does that inspiration come from?
It comes from two or three sources. The first was when I decided to use tar and create a black background. The material I was using — a tar-like bitumen — was a classic black used in Flemish painting. I wanted to reintroduce that kind of still life into abstract painting — no one was doing that. Those genres were always less important than portraiture and landscape. So I decided to put it back.
The second reason was I was doing landscapes and did it to start making comments on different modes of working — landscape, still life and florals are what emerged. I did catastrophes, fruit and flowers. Those are the classic themes. I wanted still life to be used in a more abstracted way. Since the paintings used industrial materials I wanted still life to convey weight, mass and form.
I was interested in breaking away totally from using abstract imagery and bringing architectural elements into a flat mode. Since I was raised in the theatre, I thought the platform would be a good way to start. I ripped the flooring up and put it on the wall.
I also used a gas pipe to raise it [the artwork] off the edge of a standard stretcher. I wanted to emphasize it was painting, and contrast the front of the painting with the backstage. I had two paintings, pear paintings, that had a back and a front. It’s hard to see, but the person who owns it knows its there.
The materials you use include not only gas pipes, tar and plaster, but floor tiles. Did you ever work in construction?
I did when I first came to New York, but my father owned a tire company and I worked for him. I come from a classic American working family tradition.
I felt that all materials we use are industrialized. Everything is bought — even paint. You go into a store and buy it. The fruits I used in my paintings were supermarket fruits. They were engineered to be exactly the same size, shape and color. There was no variation in the lemons. Everything is replication — the linoleum comes in standard sizes, and a lot of the imagery repetitive. I’ve also used dominos and other produced things.
How has the current economy and art market affected your work? Has the art scene changed a lot in recent decades from your point of view?
It’s changed dramatically. The ‘80s, when we emerged, we saw an explosion in the interest in art. The downside was people bought in and treated paintings as stocks. Once that took hold and auctions got into contemporary art making, the manipulation of prices skyrocketed.
That gave people whose parents were in the stock market the idea that their kids could make money on it. More kids became artists and there were more art dealers. The amount of people pursuing it exploded. They think of art as a commodity. Most of us from our generation, even though we used the allegory of commodification of art, it was true what I was saying, and it became truer.
The catastrophe paintings have an air of truth as well.
In the disaster pictures, I was making statements about abandoned steel mills, rigs exploding and wars in Iraq and Iran and what can happen when a shell is fired from 40 or 50 miles away. No matter how sturdy a structure seems, it’s still fragile and subject to death and decay and going away. Which is exactly what’s happened to everything.
A lot of what I was addressing became more and more true. I used the fireman as the institutionalization of one’s ability to deal with chaos and those meant to maintain order. After 9/11 the fireman became the symbol. As depressing as it is, I understand it. Genetically modified food, meat, and things are just manufactured more and more to the detriment of the earth.
Does that mean you are a prophet?
No, it’s just the nature of painting.
How has the relationship between dealers and artists changed in recent years?
Dealers can’t do what they need to do for any artist. There’s too many new people making art, people want to jump in on the speculative thing and art galleries are trying to do the job with huge overhead. It’s expensive to maintain these places, there’s not a commitment to any artist. A lot of artists can only show once every other year. What do you do in the meantime? All the galleries want an exclusive. But you only have you.
I think everyone has less power in art these days except those who buy. Dealers chase money more than art. As an artist you have to navigate out of that — dealers who look out for clients rather than artists. It’s the reverse of what it used to be and it’s not good for anybody.
Why do you choose to work on such a large scale?
In terms of scale, mine isn’t as large as a lot of large scale works, and I have done some smaller. They used to say if you can’t make it good make it big. And if you can’t make it big, paint it red.
I unfortunately made a lot of paintings that are green. People say they’re hard to sell. I had a friend who had a beautiful Monet, like a forest, solid green with flecks of white. I said it’s one of the best I’ve seen. Her grandfather wanted a Monet and even in the 19th century, they were hard to get. There was a sale, and the dealer said if anything was left over, he could have it. The guy said you can’t sell a green painting … that was in the 1890s.
You spend most every weekend at your home in Sag Harbor. How did you discover the village and why do you feel it’s been a good place for you?
I found Sag Harbor when I rented a house here for the winter. It belonged to a friend of Dorothy Lichtenstein. I rented it for the winter and I came out. I didn’t even have a car, and didn’t think I would need one. I like the town and wanted a place here, but didn’t want a house too far away from town.
Then a house came up across the street for sale and I bought it. I thought this would be nice — you could just come out on the bus, stay in town, and could leave a car here to do those things you needed to do. It was easy to maintain, latch-key basically. I bought it and have grown to love it.
When I moved here, I thought this is as close as I can get to the feeling of San Tropez, although it’s smaller. Then I heard Balanchine had said it was the closest thing he’d ever seen to southern France with that marina with the ships. It has a feeling like that. I have this private space really in the center of town. If Bulova happens, it really wouldn’t bother me — but it would be hard to live through the construction.
