Wendy Seller’s practice explores the fusion of traditional painting techniques and digital image-building. Seller’s embrace of these polar-opposite art making approaches enables her to create intangible, hybridized worlds that integrate past and present, populated by magical figures and surreal landscapes.

Seller developed this technique with Photoshop when an inherited “essential hand tremor” made it extremely difficult for her to write or paint any longer. Her digital collages evolve from a myriad of sources, including her photography, Renaissance paintings, and current-day catalogues or magazines. A single pictorial fragment or contemporary concept can serve as a seed that explodes in multiple directions, and begins an unpredictable journey into the deepest crevices in her brain. As Seller develops work, she often prints out sections of it, paints on them, scans them back into her computer, and then manipulates and integrates the painted elements into the collage using Photoshop. This is a back-and-forth process. 

In Hybridized Worlds, Seller uses collected imagery to create metaphorical women who emit internal power, fortitude, assertiveness, and wit. Seller sees her collages as decisively positive as she observe changes within society concerning women’s lives.  

Artist Bio

Wendy Seller’s collages seamlessly fuse traditional painting techniques and digital image-building to create compelling surrealist works. Her solo shows and small group exhibitions include venues in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Arizona, Ireland, and Germany. Seller’s work is held in over a dozen collections, including 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 College in Boston. Her paintings, and more recently her digital collages, are featured in three issues of New American Paintings and over eight editions of Studio Visit, published by Open Studios Press.

Seller was part of a small group of mid-career artists who purchased and repurposed an abandoned elementary school in the late 80's, ultimately creating 14 large live/work studio spaces called the CLAFLIN SCHOOL STUDIOS. Single handedly she redeveloped half of the school gymnasium into the studio of her dreams, which took over six years. In 1994, a two-page article on this massive project was featured in the New York Times, entitled "A Drill and A Dream Make A Gym a Home.” Her renovated gym now serves as the residence for both Seller and her husband, as well as a working space for her practice.

Seller taught Design and Spatial Dynamics at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1990 to 2013, and now focuses full time on her professional art practice.