DAVID SEATON

A Few Observations on David Seaton’s Most Recent Paintings

In 1848 an American mathematician Reverend Thomas Hill published Puzzles to Teach Geometry, seventeen cards featuring forms composed of triangles. Each card challenged students to combine a series of these forms to make specific shapes, like two equilateral triangles. Hill’s puzzle forms were mere outlines, and teachers initially used them to ask students to how many angles they saw; were these angles acute or right, and where could you draw a diagonal? etc. Hill included no instruction nor context, save for a brief paragraph on the puzzles’ ancient Greek and Chinese roots, in which he coined them “tangrams”. As a tool for teaching rudimentary geometry and formal analysis, Hill’s puzzle book was a huge hit, and eventually evolved into a popular parlour game composed of seven coloured triangular tiles.

Most people encountered tangrams in primary school, as a way of identifying various basic shapes and how they might relate, but the fact that these shapes were distinctly coloured was not mere design. Colours are practically the first thing we are taught because they help us to describe reality (the apple is red, and so on). And if we were lucky, we were encouraged to explore colour through our childish senses, and not discouraged from drawing a green sky because the air smelled like grass that day, or colouring a dog blue, because we loved our dog and that was our favourite colour.

So where did this instinct go when we learned paired perception? Once we grasped that because most people read grass as green and the sky as blue and therefore, these are the colours we should use to replicate them, what happened to our nascent sense of emotional colour? Did we replace feeling with data out of some survival instinct that expression necessarily came second to being understood?

Colour, and its expressive power has always been the engine behind David Seaton’s painting, but it connects equally to his talents as an educator and even as a musician. When he paints his environment, he also interacts and corresponds with it. Most importantly, he listens to it.

Throughout 2022, Seaton developed Harmonics, a series of eighteen paintings on vellum, that incorporate similar forms and colours – ultraviolet, grass-green, ochre and black – to those he had used in Black March, a series made completely in lockdown.

Stylistically, Seaton’s recent paintings might recall works by Der Blaue Reiter. In fact, Kandinsky later wrote that group’s name derived from his and Franz Marc's mutual love of horses and the colour blue.[1]. But more to the point, these artists believed in the promotion of modern art; the connection between visual art and music; the spiritual and symbolic associations of colour; and a spontaneous, intuitive approach to painting. But in David’s work, those last two adjectives arguably don’t apply. While his compositions and colour harmonies often appear spontaneous and intuitive, they are really the product of longterm observation, and careful draughtsmanship (Serrania de Ronda).

The GRAZALEMA drawings perhaps best assert Seaton’s background as a sculptor

• chunky, faceted

• volumetrics, physicality of the mountains themselves

• structural reality, mass

• All of which connect to his concept of “solid light. light as substance”. Basically, he’s trying to model with the plasticity of light.

• NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT - REFERENCE guzman’s film

GRAZALEMA DRAWINGS

Grazalema drawings remain the core of the current work and the experience - which lasted 5 years - was the richest realisation (return) to his original atomic understanding of form and landscape that he learned from Miles and he, in turn learned from Bomberg - (and Bomberg, for that matter understood from Cezanne.

“I like to have one ongoing drawing.” Like a touchstone.

exchange of energies (v. Blakeian, flash undertstanding …  experience.

Also, “All the time I drew there I have a problem containing the image, no matter what the size of the paper.”

You were trying to contain it.

“That made me think that the type of energy exchange between you and the view os like a bang and it’s a bang that still reverberating as you’re trying to draw it.”

Also, “All the time I drew there I have a problem containing the image, no matter what the size of the paper.” You were trying to contain it.

“That made me think that the typeof energy exchange between you and the view os like a bang and it’s a bang that still reverberating as you’re trying to draw it.”

Crystalline light - like sherds of glass in the winter.

Euclidean unities.

“I like to have one ongoing drawing.” Like a touchstone.

Cf: much earlier drawings - seed, Anguilla, pesca, etc.

“That’s why I spent so long drawing that mountain, because I couldn’t see all of it it, and that process of understanding that I never would … “

——

UNARY - BINARY

If we accept that colour is another way to express data, that is, a wholly perceptual property, and not a physical

Likewise, our first tools for interpreting data were our fingers: this is called unary. It’s a basic - arguably instinctive - system of using a single symbol, in this case, one of our fingers, to communicate objective reality - say, for example how many crayons one might have, and which ones are, say, unbroken.

“That's just called base-1, where the base under which you're operating has one digit in it, like literally a human finger, and maybe multiple such fingers, if you need to count higher. But of course, most of you, if not all of you, generally, vaguely know that computers use something other than unary-- and even you and I probably don't use this that often-- they use what language or alphabet instead. Yeah. So binary, so binary is indeed the system that computers somehow use. So in this case, bi implying two, and so computers have two digits, it turns out, at their disposal. And in fact, if you've ever heard the technical term bit, which is like a smaller version of a byte-- more on that soon. Well, a binary digit is the origin of that term "Bit," because if you get rid of some of the letters, and are left from binary digit with just B-I-T, thus is a bit. A bit is just a 0 and 1. It's two more digits than you might have on your own finger, and of course, it's fewer though than you and I have. You and I typically use, as humans, the decimal system. Dec meaning 10, because you and I generally use 0 through 9.”

So we instinctively use and understand unary, but computers use binary.

I don’t know why exactly we, as human animals tend to think and talk in terms of decimals, but I’m guessing it has to do with how we’re made (i.e., axial symmetry, ten fingers, etc.). Anyway…

Fact is, we think and talk in terms of decimal.

So how does this differ from how a computer talks - i.e. binary?

I kinda doesn’t.

Even if it’s just received wisdom, we know that computers speak binary, which is composed of 0s and 1s, and each is 0 or 1 is called a bit. So a bit is an either/or: it’s a 0 or or it’s a 1.

Technically, we call this a binary digit.

But how do computers (or indeed anything) speak in in only two symbols? How do we say “0”, so that others know we mean 0, and not “1”?

Harvard professor David J Malen encourages us to think of this as a physical distinction, like turning a light bulb on or off:

“And so by human convention, let's just assume that if you were a computer, … you want to represent the number 0, you know what, you just keep the light switch off. You keep a light bulb off. If by contrast, you're that same computer, and you want to represent the number 1, you take that same switch, that same light bulb, and just turn it on. So a light bulb that's on represents a 1, and a light bulb that's off represents a 0.

So far, so good, but how does this either/or convert into a fluid language?

“Well, at the end of the day, you and I are charging our laptops or phones at night. So there's some physical resource being replenished there, whether you're on battery or some power cord. And so inside of a computer are just thousands, millions of tiny little switches, nowadays. You can think of them metaphorically as light bulbs, but they don't actually shine light. But there are tiny, tiny little switches, and those switches, if you've ever heard the term, are just called transistors.”

Binary is context dependent - And indeed, so long as you and I just agree, as humans long have, what these patterns are going to be, all of our systems, many of our systems nowadays are indeed interoperable. (David Malan)

Jan 2022

Latest paintings have comparatively little vellum reserved but greater use of neutral colours (white umber and ochre to make a warm clunch? grey, umber, black).

Set of marks that lead to another set of marks, that create an “alternative timeline”

“When you look outside, you don’t see a still image, a static “reality”, you might even extend that to musical scores …”

Babies have very limited vision during the first few months of life, however high-contrast, black-and-white images cater to the way babies’ eyes work. Thanks to their underdeveloped retinas, babies under the age of 3 months see only in shades of black and white, and can only really focus on objects about 8–10 inches away. In order to make out their surroundings, babies focus on the edges of objects, where the contrast is greatest, so black and white images are particularly easy for babies to see. 

The idea that we first make sense of the world in black and white, made me think of

Look at Frans van Masereel’s use of solid/void, black/white (vice versa) to propel an actual story.

Cézanne: ‘Putting aspects of the world into the same surface is, for Cézanne, putting them into the eye’ – yet ‘being in the eye’ is also ‘its being over there in space’. (Clarke)

“FOLLOWING A THREAD MUSICALLY IS VERY SIMILAR TO FOLLOWING A SHAPE IN A PAINTING. WHAT DETERMINES THE SHAPE IS FEELING FOR THE EDGE WiTH THE BRUSH.” Note that in the most recent work the shapes share few, if any, flushed edges. Also note the distinction between the faceted edges of the Black March shapes and the much more kinetic independence of the forms in Harmonics. “IT’S like drawing with the brush, but they’re not coloured drawings.” “Here, colour and its density changes throughout the day, depending on the light and the air. At its most intense (contrast/saturation) this intensity makes forms utterly volumentric.“

But would it be the future of art, the logical outcome of whatever synthesising tendency the arts might have? I think this very much depends upon whether one is asking a musician or and artist/musician (obvs. David). And for that matter, isn’t the idea that a human being can perceive music, visual art, etc with ALL of their senses and enjoy different experiences accordingly, total sensory immersion, kinda utopian?

Peter Vergo Vergo begins by showing how music, or the discourse surrounding it, helped painters legitimise the new abstraction of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Kandinsky, however, saw music as authorising his ‘spiritual’ colour equivalences and abstractions. He venerated music and complained that traditional painting ‘employs its mighty resources not in order to speak directly to the soul, as all music does, but squanders them on ... imitating objects’. In this, he was typical of many artists and composers who were less invested in the convergence of different media than in the hierarchy between them.

painter Adolf Hölzel considered music the most sublime art form, since it had no obligation to represent nature.

Recall that our idea is that maybe we introduce words into a language when there is something that we want to talk about. So perhaps this effect arises because objects – the things we want to talk about – tend to be warm-colored.

——-

Equally potent in Gorky’s painting, however, is the unfailingly harmonious balance in the composition, the beautiful fit inside the frame, the lessons of Poussin visibly in use. 

Twilight and dawn

When the light goes down the colour comes up from the earth.

• There’s a dialogue going on, an exchange.

All the senses, all your subconscious 

You have to ask it, “what do you want??”, or it will ask you.

It’s fascinating that we usually have no block to accepting this about houses, but somehow less so with, say, a mountain.

In your face physically that makes you claw for a horizon line to ground yourself but you soon sense how pointless a horizon is as landscape punctuation because,  there, the sky has mass.

• “And in winter the light has a sound, it pings”

• Perhaps that’s why his paintings are really, in concept, sculptures

Experiencing the resonances of the area to grasp the subject to enter into a dialogue with it.

The landscape exercises a power or hold over you, but that power is based on human senses.