Megan Seiter: Bloom

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is thrilled to present Bloom, an exhibition of new work by Megan Seiter.

Distracted or otherwise impatient viewers might be forgiven for strolling past Seiter’s colored pencil works on paper, wrongly presuming them to be handsome color photographs. That would be their loss, and a grievous one at that. These floral still-lives do not bloom in the viewer’s mind until time is taken to examine and savor them with the considered scrutiny that they deserve. At that point, the passive viewer becomes the active beholder of something remarkable and subtly dramatic: microcosms of pitched effloresce and impending detumescence radiating an uncanny and optimistic grace.

Seiter’s still-lives are both subtle and sophisticated. She uses reference photographs as a starting point for her work. But unlike many artists who operate in this way, she departs from those sources rather than working toward them, judiciously incorporating subtle elements of chromatic fantasy to the rendering of flower petals and other botanical elements. One of the ways that Seiter accomplishes this is by suggesting that her subjects are bathed in complex light sources. Some illuminate from the side while others brighten from above. Still others glow and refract light from within, aligning with the metaphysical still-lives of Giorgio Morandi and the Neoclassicism of Jean Siméon Chardin. In greater or lesser degrees, they also tip their hats to three of the four sub-genres of still-life sanctioned by the French Academy in the eighteenth century, those being flower pieces, banquet pictures, and memento mori symbolic tableaux.

In several of her works, Seiter uses a dark, almost black background to maximally contrast the rich color of the floral arrangements and their containers. Because she uses colored pencil augmented with spare applications of watercolor, there are rich albeit exceedingly subtle variations to be discovered in these shadowy, darkened spaces, which, despite initial appearances, are by no means flat. Other backgrounds are lighter, but still rendered in atmospheric cool colors, in several instances a tinted viridian green. In all cases, the cool backgrounds set off the warm and ebullient hues of the flower petals, making them appear to advance toward the viewer, giving them an uncanny, almost fluorescent cast. Each is a kind of painting within a painting, describing the graceful undulations of the floral forms via subtly exaggerated shifts in hue and chroma rather than working with light highlights and dark shades of the same color. These exaggerations make for a more sumptuous viewing experience because they engage and stimulate a greater range of neuroreceptors at the back of the viewer’s eyes.

In a more subtle register, we can also notice similar chromatic fluctuations in the way that Seiter describes the various vases containing her flowers. Some of these are transparent or translucent glass that pull double duty as magnifiers of the light reflected and refracted from within their interiors. One container is a ceramic vessel with a mottled surface, its layered colorations described a variety of earth tones. It is interesting to note that this vessel was made and fired by Seiter, just as some of the flowers that Seiter portrays were harvested from her own garden. Even her choice to work on paper rather than other less delicate supports plays into her dramas of transcendent vulnerability, as the paper itself can be viewed as a material synonym for the flower petals, as well as for the precarity of life itself. These facts prove that for reasons pertaining to chromatic complexity and metaphorical subtlety, there is always much more to see in Seiter’s still-lives than that which initially meets the eye. They reward the viewer’s willingness to discover those things with an exquisite visual pleasure that lives in memory even as it also exercises an immediate impact on the physical act of viewing.

Megan Seiter was born in Rhode Island. In 2009, she received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art before moving to California. Her work has exhibited extensively across the United States and has been featured in publications such as American Art Collector, Fine Art Connoisseur, and Southwest Art Magazine. This is her first solo show at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.