Wendy Seller

Artist Statement

My practice explores the fusion of traditional painting techniques and digital image-building. The simultaneous embrace of these polar-opposite artmaking approaches enables me to create intangible hybridized worlds populated by magical figures and surreal landscapes. My narratives include fragments from painted masterpieces, contemporary photography, and snail mail. With a background in sculpture, I aim to heighten the illusion of dimensionality. Being a painter at heart, I infuse elements of “painterly painting” and “human imperfection” at every turn.

At the start of my evolutionary process, I follow my heart as I burrow through my extensive collection of images, searching for a spark that stops me in my tracks. This serves as a seed that explodes in multiple directions and begins an unpredictable journey into the deepest crevices in my brain.

My studio tools include an iPhone camera, computer, flatbed scanner, color printer, and gouache paint. Image fragments from an array of sources are scanned into my computer, enabling me to cut, past, assemble, segment, manipulate, and distort all of my fractured parts on my journey to discovering unpredictable scenarios. My use of digital software (Photoshop) affords tremendous flexibility in terms of layering. I contrast these qualities with the quieter, more nuanced layering techniques that have been used by painters for centuries.

I do not pre-conceive my investigations into the unknown, and sketchbooks in this case are not helpful. In contrast to a carefully thought-out concept, I turn blindly to my subconscious as I selectively, uncontrollably, consider my options. I am relentlessly in pursuit of contradictions, analogies, metaphors, and wit.

Artist Bio

Wendy Seller is a surrealist painter who lives and works in the greater Boston area. She has had solo and featured exhibitions in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Ireland, and Germany. Her images can be found in over a dozen collections that include the Ballinglen Museum of Contemporary Art in Ireland, Fidelity Investments in Boston, Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence, and the Women Artists Collection at Simmons University in Boston. Her paintings have been published in three issues of NEW AMERICAN PAINTINGS, over ten editions of STUDIO VISIT, and as the sole visual for an internationally-distributed holiday card printed in 15 languages by Arthur D. Little.

She was one of the founders of the Claflin School Studios in Newtonville, MA, where a handful of established artists purchased an abandoned elementary school for permanent live/work studio space. The artists served as the developers for the project and brought it to a highly successful completion. Over a period of six years, Seller designed and built her studio from scratch (single-handedly), within roughly half of the old school gymnasium. In 1994, the NEW YORK TIMES featured a two-page article on the documentation of her process, entitled: “A Drill and a Dream Makes a Gym a Home: How Wendy Seller Did It.”  The nine images included in this feature were taken by notable Boston Photographer Will Howcroft, who became her husband in 2001.

Seller taught Design and Spatial Dynamics in the Division of Foundation Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1990 to 2013. She left teaching to focus full time on her professional practice in her Newtonville studio, exploring an experimental process that she had developed using digital collage. To see her studio as it is today, go to: http://wendyseller.com/studio