Recent Tributes to Charles Seliger (June 3, 1926 - October 1, 2009):
"...Charles Seliger was an artist and a painter all his life. It was his life. It was not a parade, and he did not parade like so many artists. Nor was it an act of struggle or rebellion. It was so much a part of his life that he was happy to share it with the life around him. He had a family. He had a job! And he painted. He was not a bohemian. He was an artist. Artist as poet, explorer, gardener, astronomer, composer, and botanist. Artist as painter. - Addison Parks
"...The issue of the scale of Charles’s work must be addressed head on. He famously stated that he wanted to “tear the skin from life, and peering closely, paint what I see”. To do so, he had to pull the viewer into a world smaller than herself, into a simulacrum of the subatomic, into the visceral, into what he called “articulated space”. His rejection of the use of physically large formats precisely enabled him to achieve a vastness of near infinite proportions. From his paintings inspired by insects (perversely larger than the usual size in his canon) to his rhapsodic late works that speak to the condition of inchoate states of matter, it’s been about “peering closely”. He once told me, regarding his dedication to his unique working methods and images and in answer to any rhetorical question about concentrating one’s efforts: “I’m digging straight down.” That’s where he knew he would find all the territory he would ever need. I wish he were still digging right now. He’s left us too soon. I miss him so much already, and it’s only begun." - James Siena
"I only met Charles Seliger on one occasion. It happened in the afternoon at the Rosenfeld Gallery during his exhibition, maybe four years ago. He was a kind, gentle, and generous man, full of spirit and a precision of insight. Our conversation was filled with a warmth as if we had known each other for many years. I was surprised to discover that he had read my criticism. The works in the exhibition were utterly personal and without pretension. I admired the intimacy of scale in Seliger's work, and found it an antidote to the notion that abstract expressionism is defined according to scale. The expressive content in his work mattered -- both as material and as a quest for something real, a transcendence moving through the interstices of worldly immanence. I understand that his forms evolve spontaneously over time and literally became the surface. The surface in Seliger's paintings carries the remnants of a process that will eventually evolve towards an all-over lightness. Often the layering of color within this process goes beyond description. If is as if to say that space does not exist unless it is created. Indeed, Seliger created a marvelous, rhythmic, indulgent, yet levitating space. This kind of action in art not only defines the artist, but further defines the rarefied sense of being within a culture -- the human trace that belongs both somewhere and elsewhere. Seliger was possessed with the gift to understand art as a reality capable of transmission. His art is always on the verge of sending a message -- that energy and benevolence co-exist in the inner-depths, somewhere at the crossover point between the human heart and mind." - Robert C. Morgan
"My dear friend, the artist Charles Seliger, died on October 1st of a stroke at the age of 83. He was the last artistically active link to the Abstract Expressionist generation of artists who emerged in the 1940s, and an extraordinary person. He was the subject of my last book — which is mentioned elsewhere on this website — and in which you can find the details of his career. I learned of Charles’s death while watching on PBS the fifth episode of Ken Burn’s “Our National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” — a rather tedious trek through the parks’ history that made me think on several occasions of Charles, his love of nature, his life-long expression of that love in his work, and his sharp, critical sensibility. I was looking forward to talking to him about the series when it was over. The talking heads narrating Burn’s documentary — the best part of which were the splendid views of our continent’s natural wonders — struggled to express why Nature was important and why it is so affecting. From the eloquent spirituality of John Muir’s politically effective rhetoric to the practical virtues of middle-class recreation, nothing was said that rose much above the commonplace. Yes, the Grand Canyon is awesome; a stand of redwoods is cathedral-like; experiencing volcanic phenomena at Yellowstone is good for the soul, visiting a national park is like “coming home,” etc. Indeed, Burns managed by default to teach us that encountering Nature’s numinosity cannot be verbalized — only experienced. Charles, the most erudite of the artists of his generation, knew this. When I first got to know him and his very small paintings, I was amazed by the extent of his awareness of literature, natural history and science. Indeed, I first learned about fractal theory from him, and was fascinated by this window into identifying and explaining the fundamental structures of nature — invisible to the eye but available to the mind — in all their varieties of replication. Charles employed such knowledge intuitively, and in his nanoworld of imagery, emphasized Nature’s processes rather than its appearances. He understood that it was the essentially invisible activities in genetics, germination, cell division, flow patterns, skeletal structures, erosion, time’s patience and the varieties of scale’s message — not to mention the hard paradoxes of wildness — that matter most in our experience of Nature. Charles found ways to help us to experience these imperceptible, numinous events with paint on a few square inches of surface. For him, finding a smaller brush or a device that made a tinier dot, was an event. In doing so, he left us a concentrated legacy of what is sublime in Nature — and how our awareness of the invisible in the visible can let us share in its confirming, vital presence. When a young man dies, we mourn curtailed potential; when an old man like Charles dies at 83, especially a great artist who was painting up to the end, we can only rejoice in such a life. This is the time to be sad for ourselves at such a loss; but he has left us all good reason to be happy with the lifetime of numinous art that survives him. - Francis V. O’Connor
"On Wednesday evening, Abstract Expressionist painter Charles Seliger was standing next to me at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, talking about how much he loved old books and the used bookstores that had once lined Fourth Avenue on the Lower East Side. He looked very elegant, in a jacket and bow-tie, and he spoke with an enthusiasm that belied his 83 years.... ...Seliger is best-known for his small, elaborately detailed panels, covered with biomorphic forms, painted in luminous acrylic colors. Some look like a biologist’s take on Rube Goldberg contraptions, others like nebula or slides covered with paramecium. The works have names like “ Cellular Mansion,” “Suction, the Epicurian” and “Aquarium”... ...Seliger’s affinity for science and organic forms seems part and parcel with his love of books and learning. A high school dropout, who ended up being more well-read than many college graduates, he spent much of his life reading omnivorously on a broad range of subjects: art, history, science, literature. “Once, when I was in one of those used bookshops, I found a book by the writer William Dean Howells,” Seliger told me on Wednesday evening. “When I got the book home, I noticed there was an inscription inside. It said, ‘To my dear sister.’ And it was signed by Howells.” He smiled at the memory, still relishing the thought that he had ended up with the very special, personalized volume. I had never met Seliger before, but on Wednesday evening, as art lovers sipped wine and circled around, I was immediately charmed by the octogenarian painter’s warmth and humor. When I headed home, the image of his broad smile and crinkly eyes stayed with me for the rest of the evening. There was something at once inspiring and comforting about his presence." - Mona Molarsky <<Back to Charles Seliger In Memoriam page
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