Studio 53's season opener features gallery owners

Fri, 05/23/2014 - 1:00pm

Story Location:
53 Townsend Avenue
Boothbay Harbor, ME 04538
United States

The featured artists at Studio 53’s first show of the 2014 season will be gallery owners Heidi Seidelhuber and Terry Seaman.

On the first floor Seaman will exhibit his new drawings and Seidelhuber her steel sculpture. On the third floor Seidelhuber and Seaman will both exhibit new paintings.

Seidelhuber’s paintings present a non-romanticized view of the Boothbay Harbor area, but they are probing. They depict the town in a way the casual observer would not have the time to put together. They are dense with design decisions, utilize light, time of day, temperature, shapes and reflections.

Her steel sculpture spoofs her day job experience running a steel fabrication plant, draws on her athletic inclinations, her angst regarding travel from coast to coast, her interest in shapes and humor. Outwardly the sculptures take the form of portable containers, ladders and swings.

Seaman’s drawings work with various mathematical proportions, relationships, numerical sequences, inversions and progressions. These elements are determined and organized prior to the start of the drawing. The drawings are totally pre-conceived and not subject to spontaneity. Previously Terry has referred to them as visualizations of the music of J.S.Bach, specifically his fugues. The recent drawings expand on this concept and contain between 25,000 and 34,000 lines each. This complexity makes them less fugue-like, due to their lack of austerity, and perhaps more akin to Bach’s “Concerto for Four Solo Harpsichords and Chamber Orchestra!” (Quite a ruckus!)

His paintings approach the same sort of compositional issues from exactly the opposite direction. They are totally spontaneous, with nothing planned in advance. Despite that, the difference in medium and the addition of color he claims there is a direct relationship between the drawings and the paintings and that they each affect and feed off the other. Unlike the drawings, which he designates numerically the paintings do have titles but those titles are only determined after the painting is complete.

Also on exhibit throughout the rest of the gallery will be work by the other Studio 53 artists, Dick Alden, Pricilla Alden, Donna Denniston, Bob McKay, Paula Ragsdale, John Seitzer and Lynne Seitzer.

There will be a grand opening event on Saturday, May 24 from 5 to 8 p.m. with refreshments and live music (harpsichord and piano) by Aaron Robinson. A free concert will be presented from 3 to 4 p.m.

Studio 53 is located at 53 Townsend Avenue in Boothbay Harbor.

For more information, call the gallery at 207-633-2755.