claire seidl | painter | photographer

Clare Seidl - 2010
Bio and Statement

Bio
Claire Seidl is best known as an abstract painter but she has also been a serious photographer for the last decade. She exhibits her work at museums and galleries nationally, in Europe and in Asia. She has had 25 one-person shows and is currently represented by Lesley Heller Gallery in New York, where she lives, and June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Maine where she also maintains a studio. She has shown paintings and photographs at the Portland Museum of Art, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, the McNay Art Museum, the Aldrich Museum, and the Noyes Museum. Her work is included in numerous public, corporate and private collections; and has been consistently well-reviewed in publications such as Art in America, Art News, The New York Times, Arts Magazine, The New York Observer, The Portland Press Herald, The Brooklyn Rail, New Art Examiner, and Partisan Review.

Statement
Painting - June 2010
In my abstract painting over the last three decades I have developed a kind of visual thinking that includes emotion and feeling, and a human response to paint and its qualities rather than one that is solely intellectual. This means I have no preconceptions when I begin a painting or even during its evolution. When I am painting, I do a lot of looking to see what has changed and to intuit what might come next. Over time, I have developed a visual language and vocabulary that continue to grow and change, as all languages do.

As I’ve become involved also in photography, my paintings have veered away from associations with nature and landscape. Because of its more tangible nature, photography has provoked my paintings to become more personal and expressive, and at the same time, clearly more abstract.

My paintings can be seen as sheer movement and color. Forms and lines appear, disappear, overlap and join together to create other forms, to form the whole. Layers of paint create layers of space that can also give off multiple readings: as pure abstraction, as metaphorical space or inner space. There is color with its attendant associations. There are moods and secrets. There is darkness in the paintings, and light; speed and stillness; strength and softness.

Statement
Photography - 2010
For many years, I have been photographing a century-old, family camp in Rangeley, the people in it and the woods and lakes that surround it. The resulting photographs are intimate studies with an elusive topic: the ephemeral nature of things in transition. The people inhabit and escape from the frame of the camera, but the photographs seem to suggest a human presence, with or without figures in them. The viewer is invited into this space, filling an absence as if crossing a threshold. Often, during long exposures, people become ghostlike as their movements are recorded over time. The specifics of the place and people and natural phenomena are familiar, even dear to me.

The photographs are not manipulated but many show more than the unassisted eye can see. I use long exposures; I shoot reflections and distortions through old glass, water, screens…I shoot at night, using flashlights, headlights, sparklers, the moon.

I am very interested in how we see (or don’t see) what is right in front of us. The camera can hold more visual information, especially over time, than we can. It can hold multiple layers of space and reflections in focus while we can only perceive one at a time. It can reveal what we can’t see in darkness or burn images on film over time that we can’t hold onto with our limited visual memory.