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Seth Garland

Artist  Bio & Resume


Halcyon Drift 20 X 38 oil on panel

Seth Garland was born in Cornwall in 1977. His passion for painting stems from his background as his parents are both top professional illustrators, his father being best known for illustrating the Tolkien book jackets. This constant connection with the visual arts created a vibrant illustrative environment in which to grow up and where his obsession for painting began. During his study at Central Saint Martins, Garland won second prize in 'The Art of Imagination Open Competition', held at the Mall Galleries, London and was their youngest prize winner at the age of 20. His paintings are influenced by the works of the Italian High Renaissance.

By reviving a Renaissance method (the same used by Leonardo da Vinci and Holbein) and marrying it with the compositional approach of fashion photographers, the result is a sumptuous hybrid of modern beauty and Renaissance nuances. His work shows an understanding of histories present within the painting process, his contemporary approach to panel painting uses contemporary subject matter to employ these techniques in a modern context.

Education

1996-1999
Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design
1995-1996
Plymouth College of Art and Design

Awards / Exhibitions

2007
Seth Garland, Cubed, Solo exhibition at the Albemarle Gallery, London (catalogue).
2006
Summer Show, group exhibition at the Albemarle Gallery, London (catalogue).
1998
Art of the Imagination Open Competition. Mall Galleries London. Second Prize. Awarded £1500. Youngest prizewinner at the age of 20
2003-2008
Exhibited permanently at Lakeside Gallery, Cornwall as part of a three person show.
1999-2004
Exhibited permanently at Lakeside Gallery Barbican, Plymouth as an artist in residence.
1999
Art of the Imagination Open Competition, Mall Galleries, London Juror: Bridget Marlin, co-founder of the Art of the Imagination Society together with Professor Ernst Fuchs and H R Giger. Prize Winner.
1998
Art of the Imagination Open Competition, Mall Galleries, London Juror: Ernst Fuchs, Professor of Art, Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, Vienna, Austria.

 

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Joseph

The Silence of the Spirit

 

" If the Images were not, at the same time, an opening towards the transcendent, we would eventually suffocate in any culture, so big and admirable as we suppose it. From any spiritual creation stylistically and historically packaged, we can join the archetype. " Mircéa Eliade, Images and symbols.

Lover of the works of Rembrandt, Hammershoi and Wyeth, Richard T. Scott is not what we could call, an " artist of his time ". Whether you think he's inconvenient or irrelevant to the present day, one thing is sure: his work exceeds by far - both by les qualités plastiques and by the choice of its subjects - the formal expectations which compose the taste of our time. Having never given up to the sirens of malpractice and violence, his paintings open for us, instead, the doors of a world ô how much more spiritual and nuanced.

Whether it is in his portraits, his compositions, or either still in his interiors, Richard T. Scott always tries to produce, on his spectators, a certain effect of strangeness, or at least, something like a feeling of longing. That's why, maybe, his compositions are populated for the greater part with mirrors in which appear, not simply beings just like those who face us - but of real spectres having the function to destabilize our glance while giving the fourth dimension for us to see.

In his painting entitled "The Death of Uriah" for example, (God of Light) ", Richard T Scott built no less than three spaces overlapping each other: the first one is a glass door, revealing half of a scene in which a candlestick burns; in other one, the rest of this scene presenting an empty armchair; and finally, at the back, another window through which we see the silhouette of a man observing the whole composition.

By this intelligent arrangement, it is not only the story of Uriah (who king David ordered to death in order to cover up his vice of flesh) that this painter has succeeded in revealing, but more still, maybe, the atmosphere of lie and mourning in which his wife lived, having learnt of the death of her husband. A question, then, cannot but arise to those who will observe the scene attentively: who is the character lurking in the background? Would it be king David himself, contemplating the intimacy of the drama of which he is the author, or would it be the image of Uriah - innocent victim of an adultery that provoked his death?

If we cannot answer with certainty this question, nothing prevents us, on the other hand, from seeing in the empty armchair which is held in the background, Uriah's real absence, and in the candlestick being held in the foreground - the light of which reaches us only through the veil of a window - the masked guilt of king David consumed secretly by the fruits of his passion. In front of such a painting, blended with the greatest technical mastery, the intelligence of the composition, how could we not bow before  Richard T Scott's figurative genius - and to celebrate, in advance, its next compositions?

Frédéric Charles Baitinger

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Joseph

The Artistic Nature of Ron Kent

A Special Essay by Kevin Wallace, Specialist in American Wood Turning

Ron Kent is an artist driven by an insatiable aesthetic curiosity that demands he transcend the tried and true by rebelling against even those trails he has himself blazed. Refusing to be limited to any particular medium, process or form, he is constantly challenging preconceptions and reinventing himself through a progressive exploration of self-expression. The constant is his embrace of the organic, whether the beauty found in the grain - and sometimes decay - of wood, or in the transformation of manmade materials such as Polyurethane Foam.
A consideration of the Vessel Series works in the exhibition offers an excellent stepping off point in understanding the artist's work. Although they are not his initial forays into the realm of self-expression, they represent what originally made his reputation, leading to his being in the collection of a number of U.S. presidents and other world leaders. Executed in Norfolk Island pine - a wood that offers striking knot patterns and figure that result in beautiful abstract designs - these works seduced collectors and museum curators with their use of form and material.
Though totally dependent upon nature for line, gesture and coloration, there has always been a strong relationship between Kent's Vessel Series works and abstract painting. The expanse of Kent's bowls and his platters take full advantage of the natural formations that are often quite similar to the canvases of the Abstract Expressionists. In the case of Kent's work however, there is also line and form, largely dictated by the natural abstraction found in a particular piece of timber. The process of revealing this organic beauty resulted in the transcendence of forms associated with function into the realm of art.
Utilizing a process of repeatedly turning, sanding and soaking the works in oil, the Vessel Series works glow under gallery lighting and, balanced on a narrow foot, they appear to hover above the pedestal. While they are stunningly beautiful and showcase great technical accomplishment, they are quite often not about the physical object at all. When illuminated and displayed in a darkened environment, they concern light and form and have more in common with Light and Space artists such as Larry Bell, than with other turned wood vessels.
While these works integrated form and the woods natural beauty, works in the Post-Nuclear Series challenged this aesthetic by deconstructing the vessel. Purposely cutting into his bowls and lacing the fissures together with patinaed copper and other materials, the artist simultaneously explores ideas of repair and disrepair. This body of work initially shocked the collectors and curators who had been attracted to the classical beauty of the Vessel Series works, challenging the way he had previously been perceived as an artist. Of these works, Post-Nuclear ZO defies the seemingly sacred nature of the perfectly turned bowl form, while marrying painterly abstraction, form and concept, while Post-Nuclear 4 relates to the primitive impulse found in more recent works.
In some of the bowl and platter forms, the grain and pattern of the wood are boldly covered with paint, again courting criticism from those who came to know his work through the Vessel Series works. The Pele Series, named for the Hawaiian Goddess of the Volcano, features heavy swirls of dark acrylic paint on the exterior, suggestive of lava flow, and an interior of vivid reds, yellows and oranges, reflecting the molten lava caldera of an active volcano.  While the work obviously allows Kent to explore color, the heightened sense of form created by the dark exterior is more vital to the works. The artist has frequently referred to profile and silhouette in interviews and the Pele Series allows him to heighten the sense of line and form in the work. Recent explorations combine this work with ideas from the Post-Nuclear Series with stitching, holes, and tectonic mismatches, addresses both damage and rejuvenation.
Experiments in mass such as Gestalt allow Kent to further explore the potential of pattern in wood. The stacked work bears a relationship to Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column, yet rather than reaching for the heavens the work concerns the earth, with its ritual nature and weighty sense of stability.
The Guardians Series explores the vessel as sentinel, with shoulders rising above that of the viewer and mouths pointing to the heavens, unseen by mortals. These works harken back to the bottle forms Kent turned on the lathe from driftwood early in his career. The elongated necks of these vessels allowed the artist to experiment with the form, creating a sense that they were being pulled beyond their traditional threshold.
Untitled Wood Grain and Untitled Ublong bridge this body of work with the Apocalyptic Series - works that stand in stark contrast to his earlier explorations of seductive beauty. Consumed in flames, the wood distorts in much of his recent work in being burnt extensively to create texture and bring out the pattern of the wood grain. Further distressing the wood by working it with a wire brush, Kent creates chaotic ridges to explore the tactile as well as sculptural.
The Pele Series and Post-Nuclear Series veer toward Primitivism, while the Apocalyptic Series embraces it fully. The sculptures - stark and stripped away, are reduced to their bare essentials. If they represent an ending, they also speak the language of the beginnings of human expression, when images of Gods merged with the phallic in a direct and honest manner.
It is of interest to note that Kent lives and works in Hawaii, as his explorations - the colors of the sunset in his Vessel Series works, the charred surfaces of the Pele Series and the primitivism of the Apocalyptic Series - reflect the history and environment of the Hawaiian Islands. Yet, it is difficult to separate the impact of environment and intuition in the works of Ron Kent, as his is a world without rules or limitations, at once interior and physical. While working, he focuses upon the sensory and tactile aspects of the works in process, with the driving idea blending with the weight and smell of a work in the process.
"Many, if not most, of the sculptures I create started as an abstract idea that had to be transformed into solid physical reality just so I could see if the idea was really as appealing as I thought it would be," says Kent who, despite the beauty and harmonious blend of form and material in his bowl and vessel forms, has always been pulling and pushing at the forms, seeking just the right amount of tension.
"Even while I bask in the comfortable basic 'rightness' of the fundamental forms, I welcome the nagging discomfort of the 'stretched envelope' of the unexpected," Kent has said. In recent works, he explores this sense of tension, and even discomfort, much more directly.
Asteroid and Aftermath find the artist revisiting forms that he has pushed and pulled at repeatedly throughout his career, while exploring alternative materials.
"In 3-dimensional reality the two simplest forms are the sphere and the equilateral tetrahedron (the three-sided pyramid)," Kent says. "Does this fact explain my fascination with these forms? I don't know, but 'fascination' indeed is the right word, and I have revisited these forms again and again in a broad variety of media, scale, color, and texture."
Although fascinated, Kent is not satisfied in exploring the simplicity of these forms. Asteroid, a seemingly atypical work, is created in Polyurethane Foam and displayed on an organic reed framework. It's easy to believe that the artist sees potential in every material that he encounters.
Central to Aftermath are a group of trilons - forms that begin as an equilateral pyramid, but extend in one dimension. Still triangular in cross-section, the form reaches loftily toward the zenith, stretched out in the same manner as the artist's bottle forms. Yet, these trilons are scarcely recognizable, as they are devastated.
While the trilon form may represent a subconscious influence of the Trilon and Perisphere symbol of the 1939 New York World Fair from the artist's youth, his use of these forms in Aftermath is far from the Fair's optimistic view of "the world of tomorrow" and a "Dawn of a New Day". The work instead speaks of devastation, with five tall distressed trilons suggesting some future archeologist's model of a destroyed metropolis.
It's important to note that these bold new works explore what may be Ron Kent's principal media - light. By utilizing interference paints, the works explore a complex interplay of altered and reflected light, running across their surfaces and leaping out from the cracks and crevices.
Just as it was experimentation that brought Ron Kent critical acclaim, it is experimentation that frees him to follow his muse and explore an ever expanding and organically developing body of work.
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Joseph

Marathon Sales for Chinese Works at Auction $94.8 Million

By Frederik Balfour

Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- A marathon of competitive bidding by collectors of Chinese artworks pushed a Hong Kong auction to more than three times its estimate.

Sotheby’s biggest Chinese fine-painting sale ended last night after almost 12 hours and 364 lots. Its total of HK$738.3 million ($94.8 million) including fees was the highest for the New York-based auction house in that art category. The presale estimate was HK$200 million at hammer prices.

Wealthy Chinese are keen to buy works by the nation’s top artists. Bidding was brisk for 36 pieces by 20th-century master Zhang Daqian. Other highly sought lots by Lin Fengmian and Qi Baishi sold at several times estimates. A second sale raised $HK2.1 million for the University of Oxford’s China Center.

“I said to them to raise money is great,” Kevin Ching, Sotheby’s Asia chief executive officer, commented on the Oxford sale in an interview. “You will need to do many more auctions.” More Chinese mainland parents are sending their children to England for education, he said.

Yesterday’s top-selling lot was Zhang’s 1961 color picture “Self Portrait in the Yellow Mountains.” The ink-and-water work fetched HK$46.6 million, nearly four times its high estimate of HK$12 million.

Enthusiastic bidding in the main saleroom -- where 16 lots sold for more than HK$10 million -- wasn’t repeated in the second salon for the charity event aiding the new HK$250 million center in Oxford, England. Just 15 lots sold of 37 offered, including porcelain, scrolls and embroidered robes.

Estimate Target

Excluding the Oxford sale, Sotheby’s has raised HK$1.6 billion in four days, including contemporary and 20th-century Asian art and wine. It is on its way to exceeding its HK$2.7 billion estimate for six days of sales.

The highlight of today’s auctions include rare Qing dynasty porcelains from the Meiyintang collection and a ring featuring a 9.27 carat pink diamond known as the Golconda Pink that carries a high estimate of $19 million. Watches and jewelry from the estate of Hong Kong singer and actress Anita Mui are also on sale today, with the final sale of watches tomorrow.

Buyer’s premium, the commission added to the hammer price of works sold, is 25 percent for the first HK$400,000, 20 percent for lots fetching as much as HK$8 million, and 12 percent above that. The wine premium is a flat 21 percent. Estimates reflect the hammer price, before premium.

Potential buyers who aren’t represented at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre sale can bid via Sotheby’s online bidding system.

--Editors: Mark Beech, Richard Vines.

To contact the reporter on this story: Frederik Balfour in Hong Kong at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Joseph

Wendt Gallery Launches into the Fall Season

Figure_in_Four_Squares_28_oil_72x72A new exhibition season is upon us, and things are in full swing at Wendt Gallery.  The first few months of fall have been eventful and so rewarding. We kicked off the fall season in New York with Vanishing Spirits, an Indian photography exhibition to benefit the Salaam Baalak Trust.  In October, the New York Gallery showcased Masters of Modernism.  This exhibition featured artists from the original Guggenheim collection including: Rudolf Bauer, Irene Rice Pereira, Hilla Rebay, Seymour Fogel, Rolph Scarlett, Xanti Schawinsky, and Juanita Guccione.  Things is Laguna Beach have been just have exciting.  In September and October, Wendt Gallery of Laguna Beach showcased two artists new to the collection.  Solo exhibitions of works by Julie Shapiro (in September) and Ira Barkoff (in October) were both met with great enthusiasm.

As we move into November, we are so excited for what is to come.  The Laguna Beach Gallery presents Beatrice Findlay: New Works.  The exhibition, curated by Serina  Manqueros, will be a formal introduction of the artist’s work to the gallery.  Findlay says of the new collection: “My paintings can be read as abstractions, but they are actually hybrids.  Figurative and landscape forms are as integral to the compositions as the structural and expressive qualities of color.  Transparency, ambiguity, shifting planes and a feeling of light achieved through color juxtaposition are characteristic of my work.”

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Wendt Gallery of New York will present an exciting exhibition of contemporary Indonesian work this November.  Unity: The Return to Art showcases contemporary paintings and sculpture by some of the international art community’s most sought after artists.

Unity revisits Wendt Gallery’s South East Asian program first presented in March of 2010 in the exhibition My World, Your World, Our World. Hosted in the heart of New York City, Unity represents a turning point for Indonesian contemporary art. Fine Art galleries in the world’s most influential cities (such as Taiwan, Milan, Beijing, and Singapore) have hosted exhibitions by these innovative, young artists and continue to support this growing market.

If you would like to join our mailing list, or for more information on these and other upcoming exhibitions, please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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Wendt Gallery Makes Headlines - Again and Again!


May and June were busy months for us at Wendt Gallery.  Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings hung on the walls in New York and Laguna Beach and the Gallery popped up in newspapers, magazines and websites.  Some of our favorites include:  



Barbara Pollack reviewed My World, Your World, Our World for the June issue of ARTnews.

ArtNews_Review_Cover                  ArtNews_Review_Article


Jessica Lott reviewed Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings for Planet Magazine.

Russell Simmons said the show was a must see for art lovers.

The review for Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings on Culture Catch agreed, saying the exhibition was well worth seeing.  


IN New York highlighted Victor Matthews in the eclectic collector pages.

IN_New_York_Cover             IN_New_York_Article



The Closing Reception for Victor Matthews: Alter Ego Paintings caught the attention of The Daily News, Gatecrasher  and the blog Times Square Gossip which posted:

“The closing night party on Tuesday for artist Victor Matthews' Alter Ego show at Jospeh Manqueros' prestigious Wendt Gallery looked more like an opening with champagne flowing copiously and a swarm of society and entertainment figures like socialite art collectors Denise Rich and Joyce Mullins Jackson (who co-hosted along with Andre Harrell, Ann Dexter-Jones, Serge Becker and Andre Balazs) making the scene.  Perhaps it was because Matthews is such a favorite of the bold face set with his works hanging on the walls of homes owned by Jay Z, Lyor Cohen, Ron Perelman, Dick Parsons, Ian Schrager, Brian Grazer, Francesco Clemente and Vikram Chatwal and Russell Simmons.  Or maybe it was because Simmons, a longtime patron of the gallery and big fan of Matthews, was filming a segment for his new autobiographical reality show.  Never mind, the social swans swooned around the room striking a pose
each time the cameras panned the crowd."



Stay informed on the latest happenings at Wendt Gallery. 
Contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and ask to be added to our mailing list.


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Victor Matthews - Solo Exhibition

victor matthews

Reception May 7th, 6 to 8pm.
RSVP no later than May 4th at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Preview the exhibition online at www.wendtgallery.com
Catalog Available
Wendt Gallery is proud to present Victor Matthews - "Alter Ego Paintings", May 7th to June 12th, 2010.  We welcome you to join us as we celebrate Victor's first "Solo Exhibition" in New York in over 20 years.  This long awaited show will be kicked off with a Gallery reception at our New York location at 595 Madison Ave (41 East 57th Street) in the prestigious Fuller Building in the heart of Manhattan's East Side. 




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Joseph

Announcing "My World, Your World, Our World"

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Wendt Gallery New York would like to announce the opening of its newest exhbition, "My World, Your World, Our World," this Friday, March 19th.  This will be the premiere exhibition of Wendt Gallery's Southeast Asian art program in New York, and serve as a counterpoint to "Visions of Southeast Asia," the exhibition of Traditional Southeast Asian Art going on now at Wendt Gallery Laguna Beach.  This major exhibition will focus on Contemporary Indonsian painting and sculpture, and features the artists Jumaldi Alfi, FX Harsono, Agus Suwage, M. Irfan, Agapetus Kristiandana, Ariadhitya Pramuhendra, Dede Eri Supria, Cucu Ruchyat, Yunizar and others. 

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