VOICES: Donald Sultan

VOICES: Donald Sultan

The Sultan of the poppy talks to Phillips DROPSHOP about his new work ‘Poppies in Cement.’

The Sultan of the poppy talks to Phillips DROPSHOP about his new work ‘Poppies in Cement.’

Donald Sultan, Yellow Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Donald Sultan is a New York based painter, printmaker, and sculptor, renowned for seamlessly merging traditional and modern elements.

Christine Miele is Retail Sales Director, E-Commerce at Phillips.

The following transcript has been slightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Artist Donald Sultan

Artist Donald Sultan. Photograph © Phyllis Rose.

Christine Miele: Donald, what was your original inspiration for this work?

Donald Sultan: I’ve been doing flowers for quite some time. Basically, the poppy that I work with came from the poppy pins you put in your lapel on Veterans Day. I was living in France when I first started using it, and the French poppy pins are a very plasticy red with a black center, and we have the crêpe-shaped ones. There were several reasons I was interested in them. First of all, poppies being opiates. — just remember in The Wizard of Oz, you can see what happens. Second, it’s a play on the word “pop.” And it’s also from the field of Flanders, remembering the World War I massacres there. That’s where the idea came from. I was using them mainly in drawings first, and then in paintings. And that’s why they’re so shiny — they’re meant to be artificial.

Christine Miele: I never realized that. What draws you to continue to revisit poppies as a subject?

Donald Sultan: I’ve done a lot with them. And I did a number of lemons and tulips years ago — black lemons, black tulips, and those were very sooty and gritty, but the poppies became plastic. And I liked them as an iconic image because they appear in many different places, like children’s drawings, popular culture, even fashion designers use them for their dresses and so on. I like using that image, which is the simplest way of drawing a flower, so I made it as abstract as I could. They’re more like a kind of a quick drawing of a flower. It’s a generic image, and that’s also how the lemons and the tulips were, they can be repeated over and over again.

I like the fact that prints, especially, are industrial images. They’re repetitive, each one is not made by hand, they’re a reproduction and a remake of the image. But it’s not so much a reproduction in a way, because it follows the drawing itself and it’s made to be individual, even though they’re editioned. I like the fact that they shouldn’t vary too much from one to the other — they’re exact. And that’s one of the reasons I use poppies over and over again, and I’ve used them with different colors, too. Sometimes they’re not red poppies or yellow poppies or poppies that you might actually find in nature, they’re invented images, invented colors. White and black, for example, are not normally poppy colors (Laughs).

Donald Sultan, Black Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Christine Miele: I really like them. Have you done black and white in the past?

Donald Sultan: Oh yes. My drawings and paintings for 40 years have had a lot of black in them. For probably 20 years almost all of the flowers and the fruits were done with black backgrounds. And those were references to historic paintings — the way still lifes were done by the Dutch, the way Goya would paint a painting — a lot of the images come from my attachment to past art. And I’ve never considered myself a Pop artist. I’ve always considered myself a kind of classicist. So, in a way, the poppies are a play on the word “pop.” They pop! (Laughs).

Christine Miele: (Also laughing) They really do. I mean, you know that you’re looking at a Donald Sultan. It’s interesting what you say about your connection to past art, but how would you say your work engages or interacts with contemporary culture?

Donald Sultan: Well, like I said, that image of the poppy is used in just about everything — fashion in particular. In fact, there was a woman who does art-wear, and she saw a painting of mine in a museum in Long Island, and she made a dress from that painting. It was so great! But you know, she didn’t get permission. So, when I spoke to her, she said, “Well, what should I do?” And I said, “Well, just make one for my girlfriend.” And she did, and it’s just great! It’s a beautiful dress! (Laughs).

I’ve also done several installation works with a very famous department store in Zurich. And there was an Italian designer who makes jackets. When you go into the store, you can tell that they’re his jackets because he made little flowers, kind of like mine, which go in the lapel. He gave me a bunch of those and when I wear them everybody thinks I designed them. And I don’t take credit for it, I didn’t design them. But I really like the fact that they’re out there. I don’t know how many people see his things in America, but they were pretty popular in Europe. So the poppies interact with culture more than the lemons do. The lemons were not really meant to interact with society in that way.

Donald Sultan, Red Poppy from Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Donald Sultan, Red Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Christine Miele: Throughout your career you’ve frequently used industrial materials in your work. What do these materials allow you to achieve that more conventional art materials would not, and how does working with LITO reinforce this aspect of your approach?

Donald Sultan: I use industrial materials because I think of all art materials now as industrial — you don’t typically grind your own pigments anymore. Classically, the pigments used to be made of ground jewels and different herbs and metals and so on. But today, you buy your art supplies in a store, and they’re in a tube. So, I consider those also to be industrial colours which freed me to use any colour, any material. And I started using linoleum, tar, and cement. But the main reason I did that was because it made it cheap to do large-scale works with the kind of thickness and weight that I wanted. I wanted the full weight of construction for the painting, I wanted the furniture of the painting to be almost sculptural, but the image itself to be ephemeral. It allowed me to make a heavy-looking image with materials I could buy over the counter at the hardware store. So that was in every aspect of the paintings. The first big prints I made were made with copper panels that were industrial — they were made for roofing. That was perfect because I could get that size, and they weren’t highly polished, so they had their own character.

Since all my paintings are made with materials that we use to build buildings, I liked the idea that you came to me with to make these prints in LITO’s factory in Bregenz, Austria, using aluminium. I thought I could also use cement, and I tried to use anodized aluminum — the kind you used to have from those drinking cups that you would get for the beautiful colors — they used to make them in the 40s and 50s. But since we had so much trouble getting that kind of colour with anodized aluminium, I switched to using the kind of paint you use for cars. That’s where we came up with the idea for these colours, they’re all car paint colours. I was very interested in the industrial quality of the project.

Christine Miele: That makes sense, and it’s a good fit with LITO’s strengths. The auto-body finish on them is so smooth and very well done.

Donald Sultan: And it’s with the pre-metal fleck paint, too. Because, you know, all the cars you see now have metal and sparkles that’s been bonded to the body of the car. But originally, the old cars just had many, many layers of colour. And I like that — you’re going to get more colours that way, truer colours.

Donald Sultan, Blue Poppy from Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Donald Sultan, Blue Poppies in Cement, 2024. DROPSHOP.

Christine Miele: How do you want people to feel when they encounter your work?

Donald Sultan: I have absolutely no way of answering that question. I don’t know what people will feel when they see them or when they look at anything. I mean, what does a person feel when they see a puppy? Some people think it’s cute, some people feel revulsion!

Christine Miele: (Laughs) That’s a very good answer. You can’t worry about it. You just have to do your thing.

Donald Sultan: Yes, I only know what I want for myself. With almost all my work, I want to feel like it has an almost architectural approach, so it has a feeling of actually being something rather than an illustration of something.

Christine Miele: That’s so great. Do you have any heroes or mentors?

Donald Sultan: There are many artists that I love that I’ll take things from. It goes all the way back through history — there’s not any one period. There was a time I did a lot with Manet, but then another period where I did a lot with Goya. I’ve done a lot of things with Turner, and I’ve thought of Twombly quite a bit in certain things. I’ve thought of Pollock on a lot of things. I’ve thought of Ellsworth Kelly on a lot of things. These are people that have meant something to me. Also Richard Artschwager, John Toriano, people that I grew up with. I always look at certain things that they do or did that mean something to me.

There’s also a number of artists, like the Arte Povera people, that used industrial materials and simple things. As I delved into the history of art, I sort of skirted Pop Art, because except for maybe one or two people, I didn’t feel that it was for me — it was too much of a signature for them. It didn’t leave much room for anybody else. I mean, once you see a Lichtenstein, what are you going to do? You can’t do that or anything like it! And Oldenburg is Oldenburg, he’s sort of cornered the market on that kind of thing. Warhol is Warhol, but I especially like his disaster pieces and his electric chairs and those kinds of things that are fraught with meaning. Everyone has their things that they’re affected by and as an artist I’m affected by a lot of things. Fontana has beautiful things I’ve looked at very carefully, too.

So, that’s the only kind of answer I can give. I wouldn’t say these artists were heroes to me, but you know, in a way, I think almost every artist is a kind of hero, really. They’re just giving things to you; they’re not taking things from you. There’s something heroic about spending your life giving things to people.

Christine Miele: I love that. That’s an amazing way to look at it. So, what’s next for you?

Donald Sultan: Well, I’m going to go see this show you’re putting up at Phillips. That’ll be fantastic.

 

Discover Donald Sultan’s ‘Poppies in Cement’ at Phillips DROPSHOP >