This multi-panel work, showing a raging forest fire, belongs to Donald Sultan’s Disaster Painting series. Sultan layers tar, vinyl, latex and plaster to create ominous landscapes of industrial and environmental destruction. Dripping tar forms skeletal trees and muddies the gray sky. Orange latex licks at dead branches, engulfs trees in flames, and peels from the linoleum surface. Drawing on source imagery from newspapers, the Disaster Painting series speaks to, in the artist’s words, the “impermanence of all things.”
