Claire Seidl

Claire Seidl

Claire Seidl
Claire SeidlClaire SeidlClaire SeidlClaire SeidlClaire SeidlClaire Seidl
No End in Sight, 2019, oil on linen, 36 x 60"
“I maintain dual practices in painting and photography, and explore the same formal concerns, creating work in both mediums that draws the viewer in, encouraging contemplation and challenging our perception of the thin line between reality and abstracted memory.

When I paint, I have no preconceived ideas or plans and adhere to no set of procedural givens. My relationship to painting is not settled, but dynamic and evolving. Each painting is resolved according to its own exigencies; and, my job is to look hard and long enough to find them. I seek new ways to mesh surface and space convincingly and always look for new pictorial resolutions.

I focus on the visual, but mine is also a personal response to paint that includes emotion and feeling. Previous states and underlying incidents are often veiled, like distant recollections or like things seen briefly and now largely forgotten.

While my black and white photographs are deeply rooted in the real world and filled with the specifics of people, place and natural phenomena, my approach to realism is subsumed by the camera itself, which reveals what we can’t see—in the dark, for example, or what is lost when we shift our gaze. Many of my photographs are taken at night when our ability to see clearly may be limited but the open gaze of the camera dispassionately records everything. I use long exposures which capture the small, even insignificant or sporadic movements of a person, a shaft of light, or slow-moving waves on a lake, revealing a visible record of time passing, of memory enhanced.

There is darkness in my paintings and photographs, and light; speed and stillness; strength and softness. There is color in the paintings with its attendant associations. Something is being expressed, something uniquely human.” Claire Seidl

All works of art listed here are available for purchase. Please contact Ms. Deeds for additional information.