Seyburn Zorthian

Title: Creating a Balance

Materials: Watercolor, gouache and sumi on paper

Minimum Bid: $300

Artist’s Statement

Creating a Balance is one of a series of small paintings exploring the relationship between water, color, light, dark, shape and rhythm, culminating in compositions with varying levels of subjective meaning. The paintings of this series are non-formulaic; instead, they are “of the present”, receiving promptings from the body (eyes), Heart, and Spirit. Understanding these paintings is like interpreting a dream; it is the visual language of the Unconscious.

Influences on this body of work include many years of working with calligraphic brush and ink, an expressive process sourced from both external subjects and internal feelings. An on-going study of life through drawing has also been an important inspiration and balancing aspect for the non-objective color work.

The American and European abstract painters of the 50′s and 60′s seem to have been able to make visible the invisible with the elements of painting. From their painterly compositions came meanings that could not be explained with words. I loved those early paintings from an adolescent’s primitive perspective and they set the standard to which I aspire. Some important early influences include Motherwell, Kline, de Kooning, Gorky, Tapies, Twombly, Zorthian (my father), as well as, Morita and other Asian masters of ink and brush.

Bio
An early love of the American and European abstractionists of the forties and fifties and later study of abstract calligraphy in Japan, lead Seyburn to the development of the work she does today. She has had an ongoing interest in the relationship of opposites and last year completed a series of complimentary color studies, integrating the expressive brushstroke with the color variations. Currently, Seyburn has been working on large-scale color abstractions using acrylic and the big Japanese brush to create the bones of the painting, developing the composition further with oil.

Seyburn has shown in the United States, France, China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. She attended Chouinard in Los Angeles and San Francisco Art Institute and received a BFA degree from the California Institute of the Arts. She was a student of shodou master, Shiryu Morita, in Kyoto, Japan in 1974. Seyburn lives in the mountains above Santa Barbara and maintains a studio at the family-owned Buttonwood Farm in Solvang, California.

Website: www.seyburnzorthian.com