Artist Interview With Durand Seay

Today’s Artist Interview Is With Durand Seay From Atlanta Georgia

Whopple: Tell us about your first attempts to be creative.
Durand: I grew up in a family of talented artists, Father, Mother, Sister and Brother. My Father was an architect and painted in water colors. He influenced me in my curiosity towards painting while watching him paint as a child. He taught me at age 7 how to paint in watercolors and how to use a brush. I still have those brushes for which my father brought back from Japan after the war. He always instilled in me the understanding of keeping your paints fresh, stay loose, and enjoy playing in your process. When I was in junior high school I won a state award and propelled me. When I arrived in high school my art teacher moved me into her advanced senior class immediately after seeing what skills I had already and she wanted to challenge me. I owe her a great deal…her name is Eve Perry married to an artist Chuck Whitehead…both good friends.

In general I have been a artist all my life. It was though, in high school that I began entering exhibitions once I turned 18.

Whopple: Do you make a living with your art?
Durand: I have sold work off and on over the years. However my work holds a vision that not all from a traditional southern community like Montgomery Alabama would understand or connect with. Originality of thought, image and process, thinking outside the box, is a hard sell. Only those who understood purchased. My largest sales base was to other artists. Today I spend many hours marketing my work and to get my name out there as best I can from every means I can find.

Whopple: How many hours a day do you create?
Durand: When I am in the studio working in oil on canvas, I work for 1-3 hours at a time. Skip a day or two to allow the oils to fix a bit and then begin again. I can spend anywhere from 24-26 hours total on any single piece. However I work on two at the same time mostly.

Whopple: How did you pick your creative medium?
Durand: Facility and logistics played a big part in my art for years. I worked in oil pastel and graphite / mixed media on rag board for many years (1984-1998). I always had a good hand with inventive and expressive drawing techniques. I still do drawings occasionally and each are still powerful. There is a real joy when I can come into a classroom and run students through a drawing process to learn how to get in touch with their creativity. I create a real track race of hurdles and they light up at the end of the session to see the amount of work they actually created.

My medium of choice is oil on canvas now. For years I heavily layered the oil pastels, creating paintings in themselves. But I wanted to work big and large piece would physically wear me down too much. I decided I needed to move to oils and I had access to space in which to have a studio. Logistics!

Oils allow me plasticity, a maneuverability of the pigments that I could not get with other mediums. Acrylics just dried too fast. I could work large with big brushes and get done in minutes what oil pastels would take days to create.

Whopple: What are your inspirations?
Durand: I was always in search of an expressive, spontaneity in my work. Being an architecture student (my father was also an architect) I was fascinated with creating fantastic form on paper as a release from the rectilinear work I was drawing up in school. Even some of it worked its way into my school projects. An epiphany came to me once while seeing the movie, The Sailor That Fell From Grace From the Sea, with Chris Cristopherson. It was a very Japanese philosophically oriented story. It was an examination of the essence of what makes us up spiritually, wanting to see what was inside and hold to this truth as our center of our existence. There was a sequence in the film where children were dissecting a cat in symbol of discovering it essence. The camera took inside the animal with close-ups of the internal systems. It became more of an abstraction of images, three dimensional but all expressing space and time. I discovered how I could apply my skills as an architect, build space and relate three dimensional objects to create an expression or feeling. I suddenly felt the wind on my face and I could capture that as a three dimensional abstraction on a two dimensional surface.

It was when I visited Rome and toured the national museum there that I was able to see for the first time Boccioni’s bronze sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, 1913. Chills flew across my body. Suddenly the second epiphany of my art came to light. Not only could one utilize three dimensional abstract forms to express themselves, it could also engage time and space. Movement, grace and spirit were there before me and I then understood just where I was going in my work.

I however always wanted to engage a narrative. Salvador Dali and Picasso both influenced me in that regard. Dali however delved deep into our souls, providing symbolism of spirituality, going beyond the conscious mind. After reading his “Diary of a Mad Man”, I was hooked.
Today though I now see that forms in nature have had a big influence in me and my work as well. The basic structure of a leaf, or sea weed, or coral structure, or the skin of a cantaloupe all are expressions of an architecture in nature. Free form in first observations, but then recognizing a system within. These to me are becoming my way of expressing symbols of a spiritual nature.

Whopple: How do you recharge when your creativity hits the wall?
Durand: Look for piece within myself. Usually though, when a painting hits the wall as you say…..I grab the sand paper. I burrow down to previous layers to remove that which has clouding my process. It becomes my way of moving into my zen. It is a simple act, require no concentration, removes me totally where I am able to allow the source of my inspirations manifest.

Whopple: What was your first job?
Durand: Working as an architect for my father and brother’s firm.

Whopple: What are your favorite snacks when you are creating?
Durand: There is always a diet soda on hand with caffeine. I really don’t eat until afterwards due to having things like cadmium of some kind or cerulean blue on my hands along with solvents. But afterwards, having a mini Butterfinger is so satisfying

Whopple: What gives you hope in the world?
Durand: When you witness a man who frees himself from the rubble of an earthquake crushed building after being trapped for 11 days.

When you witness the simple act of someone extending their hand to another in friendship to shake hands.

An embrace.

Whopple: What do you wish you could do?
Durand: My career has been in architecture in addition to being an artist. There will always be a joy in the opportunities it provides me to help people. I will always work within architecture to some capacity, but with always a spirit to enrich people’s lives. To be a guide to whatever extent I can in directing people toward what makes for great places. This is why now I write. (www.mkartntwr.wordpress.com.)
But, a big BUT, the single greatest wish is for me is to move into painting as the central source of a decent income.

Whopple: What are your artistic goals?
Durand: Continue the exploration of structures found in nature as inspiration to my abstract narratives.

Continue to market my work to gain acceptance of my originality such that I am placed with one man gallery exhibition.

To Teach so that I may light sparks in the eyes of others.

Whopple: What has been your most exciting moment as an artist?
Durand: The biggest moment was in 1984 when I won my first Best of Show in the Montgomery Art Guild Museum exhibition. It was juried, in the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. This was the first of later becoming the one artists that holds the record for having won best in show for this exhibition five times.
But, when I received notice that I had won best in pastel catagorie in the 1987 Metro Art International Competition in New York, that was the most exiting.