WARREN SEELIG

After Words: An Experiment in Making and Impulse to Abstract

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After Words is an experiment in making without thinking in advance of what it is that will be made. For me it relies on coming in touch with a few ordinary materials and flat, saturated color, allowing material and color to suggest ways of working. Materials, color, and a few hand tools in combination with “manual imagination” result in discovering an abstract object or sculptural form of some sort. It is my way of freely mining the subconscious through making something by hand. Words and meaning emerge later.

Some thoughts:

1. For some, the physical act of making is a way of clearing the mind of demands from the world outside and allowing a mental state of “drift” to take hold. It relates to the Buddhist concept of the “unknowing mind” which values the intimate, immediate, spontaneous, obvious and the original above all else. Many artists seem to understand intuitively that “the true mind”, also known as wu hsin, is “no mind”. This state of unselfconsciousness is a most valued condition in the process of creativity and is not easily translated. Somewhere between the heart and the mind is a state of concentration out of which ideas, thoughts and insights may emerge. (1)

(1 ) Jacquelynn Baas, Mary Jane Jacob, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, University of California Press, 88,89 (2004)

Warren Seelig 2024

Some thoughts of great interest to me/ Warren Seelig

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August Endell

(Constructivism) An art which stirs the human soul through forms which resemble nothing known, which represent nothing, and which symbolize nothing; an art which works solely through freely invented forms, like music through freely invented notes.

Jean Baudrillard

In an era of hyper-reality, reproduction and simulation, there is a loss of emotional investment in “things”….. wherein people no longer project themselves into their objects with their affects and representations, their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Something is definitely wrong with our culture if what one can say about perception is more interesting than perception itself.

Oscar Wilde

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning and unallied with definite form can speak of the soul in a thousand different ways.

After Words

September 6 – 28, 2024

Selected Works

Press Release