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When you first look at Adam Sultan's paintings, the word foreboding comes to mind. There is, in the dark abstract figures, a sense that something is about to happen. My friend corrects me. He says the paintings are portentous. At any rate, the feeling on inevitability is unavoidable.
I am surprised a few minutes later to see Sultan's more recent works. They are abstract and lively, full of colour and unmistakable joy.
“What happened? “I ask when I finally get to meet him.
“I moved to PEI, “he says.
Adam Sultan's arrival on PEI is another step in an unlikely journey. He was born in Burma but fled with his family following a coup. The family ended up in nearby Bangladesh.
“It was a terrible change, “he says. “We went from having whatever we wanted to living, all of us, in a one room shack.” Young Adam was then witness to that country's brutal civil war, where he witnessed atrocities beyond description.
Does all that influence his work, I wonder. “Absolutely,” he says. “My background really informs those paintings.”
The family eventually made it to Los Angeles and Sultan, to art school in Kansas City. He was meant to study hotel management, but a visit to the art institute and a first, sold out exhibition, gave him the confidence to pursue life with a paint brush.
Sultan eventually ended up in Vancouver and then Victoria. He pursued painting full time and is represented in several galleries in Britsh Columbia. His work now hangs in collections from New York, to Dubai, to Canada's west coast.
But it is here, on PEI where he feels he has come home, both as an artist and a person. He visited last summer after a friend told him he would like it here. The friend was right. By April, he had bought a house in Rustico and moved to the Island full time.
“I paint eight hours a day,” he says. “I have to. It's just something I must do.” He now works in a studio high above Rustico Harbour—a far cry from his studio in Vancouver, where he had to walk around bums to get in the front door. From his current studio, he can hear the waves and walk to the water. And what has happened as a result really surprises him.
The dark figures are gone. In their place are bright colours and a sense of exuberance.
“A friend came by and looked at my work and said ‘It looks like you used to be depressed and now you aren't.' And I think that's true, I feel as if a great cloud has been lifted since I came here.”
This man who has lived in Dubai and Los Angeles, who has escaped war and lived the good life enthuses, now, about the sunrises over Rustico Harbour. He talks about the feeling it gives him and the word he uses is bliss.
In his pocket is snakeskin wallet, his one souvenir of life in Burma. The skin is burnished and fading. And maybe, finally, the memories of that time time are fading, too.
His new paintings are coral and turquoise—the colours of the first light.
Adam Sultan's work appears at the Pilar Shephard Art Gallery 82 Great George Street in Charlottetown.
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