Black Egg and Tomatoes, Aug.4

Still life painting is the representation of an arrangement of ordinary objects. This time-honored practice has captivated artists for centuries. Donald Sultan—who was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and received his BFA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago—continues to work within the genre. His depiction of objects draws attention to the visual qualities of form, color, texture, and composition. His bold, large-scale arrangements of eggs, dominoes, fruit, and buttons employ compositional methods and techniques that tie him to Modernist conventions.

Unlike traditional still life paintings where objects are realistically depicted on a table-like surface, Sultan reduces the objects to simple geometric forms presented from a bird’s-eye perspective. With no indication of a plane on which objects rest, the painting is abstracted and flattened. Sultan often uses a Minimalist grid overlaid with an outsized everyday object as in Black Egg and Tomatoes, August 4, 1998. The painting begins with four conjoined four-foot-square Masonite boards, on top of which are affixed one-foot linoleum tiles that are then covered with tar. After drawing his image on the tar, Sultan carves into the surface and the holes he creates are filled with Spackle, sanded, and painted with oil. Areas that are left untouched, such as the large, elliptical egg, are all that remains of the original tar base. The process of extracting and then sealing areas of the painting creates a surface that is at once smooth yet physically dimensional. The egg appears to float over a black ground covered with small orange circular tomatoes. According to the artist, the black egg, found in Chinese culture, was a visually odd but nevertheless familiar and mundane object.1. A solid void and a centralized weight, the egg anchors the composition.

1. Donald Sultan, telephone conversation with the author, 25 June 2004.