“Double Poppies Portfolio” is a captivating Screenprint by the esteemed artist Donald Sultan.

Donald Sultan has been working with flowers for quite some time. The poppies he works with basically come from the poppy pins worn on Veterans Day. When he started using them, he was living in France, and French poppy pins are very vivid red with a black center, whereas in the US, crepe-shaped ones predominate. There were several reasons why he was interested in them. First, poppies are opiates—just think of “The Wizard of Oz,” where you can see what happens. Secondly, it’s a play on words with the word “pop.” And they also come from Flanders, where they commemorate the massacres of World War I. That’s where the idea came from. He used them first mainly in drawings and then in paintings. And that’s why they’re so shiny—they’re meant to be artificial.

He worked with them a lot. Years ago, he painted a series of lemons and tulips—black lemons, black tulips, which were very sooty and grainy, but the poppies became plastic. He liked them as an iconic image because they appear in many different places, for example in children’s drawings, in popular culture, even fashion designers use them for their clothes and so on. He likes to use this image because it’s the easiest way to draw a flower, so he made it as abstract as possible. They’re more like a quick sketch of a flower. It’s a generic image, and so were the lemons and tulips; they can be repeated over and over again.

He likes the fact that prints in particular are industrial images. They are repetitive, none of them are handmade, they are a reproduction and a reissue of the image. But in a way, they are not a reproduction because they follow the drawing itself and are individually designed, even though they are produced in editions. Donald Sultan likes that they should not differ too much from each other—they are exact. And that is one of the reasons why he uses poppies again and again, and he has also used them in different colors. Sometimes they are not red or yellow poppies or poppies as you might find them in nature, but invented images, invented colors.

Donald Sultan – Master of Still Life