Eric Sealine: Artist’s Statement

August 8, 2023

I have always built things. While I’ve been a lifetime visual artist with a regular studio practice, I’ve almost always had a day job. There have been many: hospital orderly, carpenter, ship-keeper, boat fixer, graphic artist, museum display builder, and, for 20 years, architectural modelmaker.

Along the way, I’ve learned to work with a lot of materials and disciplines: stained glass, high-temperature vitreous enamels on plate glass, wood, (in its many varieties), Plexiglas, metal, electricity, magicians’ tricks, forced-perspective construction, oil-paint and canvas, drawing, (in its many media), bronze casting, Photoshop, boat design and building…

For each of us, every new skill we gain has the effect of multiplying the possibilities of our existing ones.

The work in this exhibition was built in the wake of a life-changing experience. After a serious motorcycle crash, I’m very glad to be alive, and it shows in the work. For me, each piece in the collection is like a physical haiku—a concise poetic offering.

BIOGRAPHY

I grew up and went to college in Ames, Iowa. Through high school and at Iowa State University I took all the art and art history courses I could and visited the Des Moines Art Center on a regular basis, but it wasn’t until my first visit to the Chicago Art Institute that something… clicked.

It was the sculpture by Christopher Wilmarth that did it. Or maybe it was the Rothko.

The Rothko filled one end of a small gallery space. I was astonished to see how important the brushwork was, how important the color was. It was something you couldn’t see on a slide. The canvas glowed. It seemed alive.

The Wilmarth was made of half-inch thick coke-bottle-green glass. Shaped like a “T,” it was heat-slumped into a smooth barrel curve, touching the wall only at the top and bottom edges. The central square was acid-etched into a frost. I remember thinking that its shadow was as much a part of the piece as the glass itself. It was the simplest, most elegant, most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that this was something worth building my life around. Maybe I actually could be an artist. That was in 1972, and I’ve been at it ever since.

Early on, I worked extensively with glass, including leaded glass, and vitreous enamel fused onto plate glass at high temperatures. After some transformative life experiences—becoming a parent and losing my parents— I abandoned abstraction, as it no longer felt meaningful. I now had some stories to tell, and I began exploring more narrative work in oils, acrylics, drawing, and collage.

As part of Corning Museum’s “New Glass” world-traveling exhibition, 1978, my work has been shown at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kyoto. Selected stateside exhibitions include Boston Sculptors Gallery; Chase Gallery, Boston; Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia; Heller Gallery, New York City; Hooks-Epstein Galleries, Houston; New York University; Toledo Museum of Art, and the Corning Museum in Corning, NY. I’ve been commissioned for several public art installations, and my work resides in numerous public and private collections. A member of the Boston Sculptors Gallery since 2008, I live and work in Arlington, MA.

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Eric Sealine: Artist’s Statement

BIOGRAPHY