Lithographs by Kurt Seaberg
On View: October 5, 2020 - January 2, 2021
Kurt Seaberg, Migrant Workers, stone lithograph, 2018
This exhibition features a collection of lithographs expertly made within the last 20 years by longtime Highpoint member Kurt Seaberg.
Kurt recently offered the following about his artistic practice:
I have been a visual artist all my life and a printmaker for the past 35 years. In that time I have honed my techniques and experimented with new ones, focusing mostly on traditional stone lithography to create images. I’ve put a lot of thought into what art is, why I continue to make it and what role an artist has to play in society. The short answer is that I’ve always loved to draw and to create imaginary worlds, so visual art came naturally to me as a child who had difficulty putting feelings into words.
But art is more than getting good at drawing or mastering a particular medium. It’s also about connecting with an audience, so I’m always mindful of what story I’m trying to tell or what feeling I’m trying to convey. Sometimes I don’t always know right away, when I start a new piece, and the story emerges at some point in the process. What I love about printmaking is that it is indeed a process, where the image can continually be shaped and altered as time goes on, and so it evolves into something entirely new, taking me to places I hadn’t anticipated in the beginning.
I’ve created a lot of landscape art during the course of my career, as I’ve always been interested in our relation to place, particularly to what we call the natural world. I spent a lot of time outdoors in my youth, drawn to the wild, undeveloped spaces that still existed in the community I grew up in. They seemed pure to me; they contained a living energy or soul and source of connection and inspiration that remains with me to this day. But most of the people I grew up with at that time weren’t connected to any particular place- they moved to wherever their jobs took them- and regarded nature as something to be controlled or transformed into something else. And so I witnessed the gradual disappearance of what I had regarded as my home, the places I felt most alive in. My neighborhood was regularly fumigated with pesticides to rid it of insects, and the birds and animals began to disappear as well. The woods down the block were cleared and turned into soulless housing tracts, meadows and farms further out became shopping malls, and wetlands were drained to make way for highways and parking lots. The sense of violation I felt at all of this destruction fueled my growing activism and the ideas that would later find their way into my art.
I believe artists have a responsibility to grapple with the issues of their day in addition to more timeless ones. For art, in my view, is a dialogue between the artist and the viewer. Pollution, climate change, the extinction of species and the loss of biodiversity, resilience, rebirth and renewal, migration, sustainability, the cycles of life and death and beauty are all ideas I have explored in the past and will continue to explore in my art work in the years ahead.
