The title of Megan Seiter’s outstanding debut exhibition at Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, which closed on the finish of 2023, encapsulated the essence of turning into. “Efflorescence,” denoting the method of a bud turning into a flower, was an apt title for Seiter’s first solo exhibition as she has been making extremely refined wax-based coloured pencil paintings, sometimes depicting an assortment of flowers, for almost 20 years. On this exhibition, Seiter conveys her emergence and transformation in each skilled and private points of her life; significantly her expertise with motherhood. 13 coloured pencil works, integrating watercolor and pastel medium, comprise the present. The grouping allowed her to create a thematic expertise and sustained high quality that showcased a capability to rework flowers into residing compositions that educate us find out how to observe and really feel issues deeply.
Seiter transforms naked floral preparations into dramatic compositions, exploring shade combos and delicate shading. Seiter’s distinctive nonetheless lifes excel as a result of she each truthfully conveys an correct rendering and since she animates her topic; the canvas feels alive due to her dealing with of the nuanced diploma of realism provided. Her gaze is paramount and delivers a fact about what is required to seize naturalism; it isn’t a contest to see how a lot she will be able to depict, however slightly, the delicate dedication of how a lot data needs to be shared to evoke the emotional second and verity of a given occasion. Seiter needs to share the sweetness she observes, replete with minute particulars, however isn’t competing with images. She manages the intentional expression of fact within the rendering of what’s seen, permitting the viewers’s delicate consciousness of the human hand, thus making the overture from artist to viewer intimate. The exhibition is as a lot about being a human being and all of the corresponding truths which congeal to make a visible affect full. Seiter conjured up one thing whose verisimilitude compels us to decelerate and really witness the great thing about what’s current. The conveyance of knowledge by way of nonetheless life, with artistically chosen gaps and restraint, presses her scrutiny on the very second visible confrontation happens and as our eyes course of an array of knowledge. In these drawings we get shade and contour, and lighting and shading: all of the issues that make human notion distinctive, coupled with a respite from the hustle and bustle of recent life. Seiter is inviting us to cease and look intently, enriching our lives within the course of.
The daring and vibrant colours Seiter had meant to depend on had been incongruent with the flowers out there to her. How they regarded each in individual, and within the reference pictures she took, merely didn’t communicate to her, thus requiring some adjustment and suppleness on her half. To sharpen the colour, she began utilizing a black matte board behind the flower preparations. What emerged consequently was stunning; the colours blossomed and sharpened in a visually engaging method. Seiter noticed correlation to her personal life as a mom. Her son was rising from a yr of health-related challenges, which made Seiter delicate to the workings of the engine of a residing factor. Within the course of Seiter realized what it’s to be human, how element is each related and an obfuscation, as she discovered the aesthetic imaginative and prescient she was in search of; a results of how we form our ideas and experiences with our personal participation. Primarily she realized to work with what now we have and provides thanks for the sweetness that’s current and which emerges if nurtured correctly.
Seiter’s artwork follow exams statement. The natural materials of her topic, and the way gentle interacts with a residing factor, is singular; as the intense high quality of freshly lower flowers within the studio erodes rapidly. Capturing and thereafter remembering the standard of luminosity she is going to talk, culminates with the transference of each what she sees and its particular person aura. An skilled draftsman, she depends on her cognition and reminiscence, all the pieces she has realized concerning the varied parts comprising a flower, and the way shade and lightweight permeates all through the viewing expertise. The reference photographs she makes use of are crucial, however the problem of transferring one thing three-dimensional to two-dimensionality isn’t eradicated, as she works via the push and pull of materiality and cognizance.
Seiter resists the strategy of compressing quite a lot of gentle sources one encounters all through the day into an amalgamation the viewer might mistake for realism. The enigmatic nature of sunshine, the way it bounces off a floor, and whether or not it communicates the actual aspect that incipiently lured her, presents the strain in her distinctive voice as an artist. It’s a problem that she welcomes. Thus, Seiter commits substantial effort to lighting experimentation. Taking supply pictures all through the day and even in several rooms; an appraisal of this ephemeral ingredient replete with shadows, all comprise her early strategy which seeks an elusive fact.
Seiter’s course of begins with a rudimentary sketch she transfers to frisket movie; a transparent acetate movie that permits her to masks the floor of her composition the place the first composition will finally be drawn in coloured pencil. Its low tack adhesive backing permits for non permanent adhesion; it’s a typical gadget utilized in airbrushing and stenciling. She thereafter applies pan pastel within the background. Pan pastels are mushy pastels (a combination of pigments, binders, and fillers) with a chalk or charcoal texture that is available in a pan type as a substitute of a stick. They arrive in a variety of concentrated colours and have a cake-like high quality which may be blended. Seiter is ready to combine and apply the pigment like paint, though it’s utilized, in her case, with a sponge by rubbing the pigment onto the paper floor.
In cases the place she has a gradient, Seiter can obtain a clean variegation with out working across the unique drawing. She then peels off the frisket movie and works the first space of the drawing with coloured pencil. Lightfastness is obtained as using pan pastel is resistant in opposition to gentle. They’ve excessive opacity and a wealthy, opaque shade. The pan pastels provide a broad spectrum of hues; they permit Seiter to create clean gradients and dramatic shadows in her backgrounds. And significantly with darkish backgrounds, the values of the first central shade drawing resonates with heightened emphasis.
Along with a pan pastel background, Seiter generally makes use of watercolor beneath the coloured pencil portion of the composition. She works principally with sanded pastel paper which is a effective grit sandpaper. Avoiding the laborious means of filling in all of the grooves of the paper with the effective level of a coloured pencil, Seiter often makes use of a watercolor layer beneath the coloured pencil. The ensuing vibrancy with the coloured pencil layer sitting atop the flat undercoat of watercolor additionally bumps up the central motif. The coloured pencil is wax primarily based, so Seiter makes use of pastel pencil for a few of the white porcelain vases she additionally depicts. This enables the vases to fade away towards the darker elements of the vessel, and not using a floor distraction which the wax sheen could cause.
Lots of the vases Seiter makes use of to stage flowers are within the form of girls’s our bodies. She has sourced them from all kinds of locations: a taxidermy retailer, the flower market in San Francisco, on-line outlets, and he or she found one throughout a visit to South Carolina. Curiously, Seiter thought she can be a determine artist whereas finding out artwork in school; she liked portraiture. And though the vases don’t essentially comprise faces and human figures per se, she is giving every flower the person consideration which usually attends to portraiture. Imperfections and variability contribute to the composition. Seiter notes that every flower association has an angle; they are often sassy or candy, as an illustration. Human determine vases additionally permit for an anthropomorphic high quality which emphasizes the animate high quality of vegetation, thus connecting us and triggering the expression of empathy.
Among the many varied phrases that describe realism, Seiter prefers hyperrealism. However even inside this context, there’s a restraint imposed. Particularly, Seiter notes that an individual’s visible area is barely 10% in focus; the remaining is peripherally imprecise. Not like {a photograph} which may current the whole composition with placing articulation, Seiter resists portray all the element she will be able to observe; in any other case the completed product may seem totally drawn on the expense of trying overly in focus and unreal. The human eye will not be seeing what {a photograph} does; the digital camera lens merely doesn’t work the identical manner that the human eye does. Consequently, Seiter smudges out a few of the texture seen within the reference pictures. Additionally, she seems to the place the sunshine hits shadows, a spot our eyes naturally need to go, and brightens texture and shade there, with the aim of constructing it replicate how the human eye would visualize it. On this manner she is adapting a photograph reference towards a human observatory. Seiter is aware of the counter-intuitive fact; that the image will look extra practical with out all the element. In impact, an excessive amount of realism is a distraction to the viewer due to the bounds of the human eye. What units Seiter aside will not be what she will be able to do technically drawing the topic precisely; however slightly, her talent at suppressing some element to make the composition current as we’d expertise it in nature. Seiter seeks a communion with the entire image not simply element and exactness for its personal sake.
Seiter references Eckhart Tolle when discussing the impression she needs to evoke. In his ebook A New Earth (2004), Tolle writes: “While you acknowledge the sacredness, the sweetness, the unimaginable stillness and dignity through which a flower or a tree exists, you add one thing to the flower or the tree. By means of your recognition, your consciousness, nature too involves know itself. It involves know its personal magnificence and sacredness via you.” Seiter’s work extols the virtues of being current and the ensuing consciousness of magnificence in probably the most pure locations. Like Tolle, she needs us to look intently and embrace the connectedness we will really feel after we permit the pure object to transmit itself to us. Seiter needs to convey this sensibility and fact to the viewing of her work. She needs the image to look actual, but additionally compels the viewer to really feel that they’re eavesdropping on her expertise intently trying throughout the stillness of nature. This methodology, one might name it a means of presence and immersion, maps out the human sensation of revelation.
Seiter’s work may be mentioned to occupy the mysterious threshold, the liminal high quality, between what’s actual and what’s perceived. In reworking what’s seen, she works the area of transition and amplifies the hardly perceptible. In doing so, actuality stays materially sure however takes on delicate luminosity and vibrancy in furtherance of connectedness. The pencil layers she applies with exacting element end in delicate shifts in shade values which unify the drawing. The expertise for the viewer is delectable. —Matt Gonzalez
Megan Seiter’s subsequent exhibition will likely be at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco this December 2024.