Black Roses

The present sheet may be associated with a series of large charcoal drawings of flowers – tulips and irises in particular – in which the rich, velvety blackness of the medium was essential to Sultan’s conception of the whole. This drawing can also be related to a later series of three aquatints of Black Roses, executed by Sultan in December 1989 and published in 1990.

Sultan was inspired to use the aquatint process as a way of approximating the appearance of his charcoal drawings. As the artist recalled, ‘I got the idea of making the prints from the charcoal drawings. I worked the charcoal a lot as powder, let it spread out over the paper, and then fixed it. One day I thought, ‘Aquatint is already powder, so if you work it dry and don’t melt it until you’ve made the images, instead of doing the reverse, you won’t have hard edges… With charcoal you’re adding, so you develop a technique to get your whites clean and your edges fuzzy. It gets really fussy. But with the prints it’s the reverse. In the aquatints, I solved the problem of how to make mysterious, intimate drawings without having to fuss with the damn thing.’ (B. Walker, Donald Sultan: A Print Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, Coral Gables and elsewhere, 1992-1994, pp.11-12).