Charlotte Sullivan
Oil painter of Malaysian nature and still life. Moths, botanicals, jungle light, old ceramics. Slow looking. Kuala Lumpur.
Message
Charlotte Sullivan is an oil painter and educator based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She grew up in a forest on the east coast of the United States, a childhood that cultivated both a love of nature and a habit of close looking that has never left her.
Trained at Pratt Institute and mentored for nearly twenty-five years by plein air painter John Osborne, Charlotte developed a practice rooted in sustained observation — what she now calls slow looking. Her paintings move between nature and still life: Malaysian jungle biodiversity, moths, butterflies, and botanicals alongside the ceramics, ikat, and transferware she has collected during twelve years of living in Southeast Asia.
In 2014 she arrived in Kuala Lumpur with eight suitcases, two children in diapers, and no art supplies. The city, the jungle, and the region’s extraordinary material culture gradually remade her practice. She completed an artist residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2022, and teaches small-group oil painting classes from her home studio in Damansara Heights.
Statement
I have lived in Malaysia for twelve years, and the jungle here has gradually become the centre of my practice. I raise many species of moths and butterflies, and observe their lifecycles closely. I paint them alongside jungle scenes and the insects I find on early morning walks. This kind of looking takes time. It asks for stillness.
The still life tradition gives me another way into the same questions. Asian ceramics, transferware, Malaysian textiles in all their variety — batik, songket, ikat — objects that carry their own histories of trade, craft, and natural pattern. I have collected these things in my studio and they always seem to find their way into my paintings.
What I am always working toward is a conversation between the natural and the man-made world. Not always in the same painting, but across the work as a whole — the moth and the ceramic, the botanical and the textile, the living and the crafted. Oil painting, with its layering and its time, feels like the right medium for this kind of attention.