"I find you don’t think of new ideas, you discover them"

A friend told me to take a look at Donald Sultan's work. Here's an excerpt from a 2009 article I found about him in the process:

"Growing up in Asheville, N.C., Sultan at an early age got interested in all aspects of theater, including set-building and lighting. At the same time, his father — who owned a tire store — would paint on weekends as a hobby, and Sultan would watch. He found himself studying painting at University of North Carolina and the Art Institute of Chicago. He poured plastic on his canvas, building a thick layer, and not only painted but also put 'debris' — such as bottle caps — into it.

But upon moving to New York in the mid-1970s, he found the plastic drums too heavy to carry to his walk-up. What to do? He liked unusual material.

'I was looking for another material that would give me the same sense of weight and volume,' he says. 'I was never comfortable just illustrating stuff with a paintbrush to make an image.'

The idea came to him one day while working as a handyman for a gallery.

'I was coming down the elevator and they were putting down linoleum tile in the floor,' he recalls. 'In the middle was a metal circle, so I asked how do you cut linoleum so it goes around the circle and they said it was easy because it was very soft. They gave me some tiles, two white and two black. I went home and I carved a little drawing. It was the first I ever did and it’s in this show.

'I find you don’t think of new ideas, you discover them,' he says.

Link to image here. 1992. Tar, spackle, oil on tiles over masonite.

Link to image here


Link to image here