Prairie City painter David Seacord is hoping his art will outlive him

Published 7:00 am Friday, November 29, 2024

PRAIRIE CITY — “I have a deer in my studio,” David Seacord announced. “But it’s getting ready to hop out.”

Seacord’s studio is an open-air space tucked between his house trailer and a steep, grassy hillside on the fringes of Prairie City in Eastern Oregon. Sometimes the deer wander in. It’s covered with a white polyethylene tarp stretched over a pole frame the size of a carport, and it’s dominated by a 4-by-8-foot wooden table, with shelving underneath, that provides a flat work surface. A smaller table and shelves hold containers of paint and other tools of his trade.

“Look at this gorgeous light!” he exclaimed. “This is where I paint in summer.”

As a young man, Seacord explained, he had a strong sense that he was meant to be a painter, but that was as far as it went. Then, one day in 1999, when he was 50, an inner voice told him it was time to begin.

He produced one painting a day for the next 2½ weeks before he had something that captured what he was trying to express.

“On my 17th painting, I painted something called ‘The Fire,’” he recalled. “It was not that good technically, but it was so passionate an experience that it felt like spirit angels putting a cloak on me.”

Ever since that day, the fire to create art has burned in Seacord’s breast.

Modern spiritual impressionism

Seacord’s art is difficult to describe.

He works primarily in acrylic, sometimes on paper, sometimes on board or canvas.

While some of the paintings have representational elements — trees, a pond, birds, dragonflies — most are entirely abstract.

Patches and fields of color shade into or overlay each other, sometimes fading delicately in and out, sometimes exploding in vibrant bursts.

Curves and lines divide and define the space, leading the eye in unexpected directions, suggesting the outlines of an indefinable form or words written in an unknown language.

Repeated patterns convey a sense of motion or organic growth.

Layers of paint swirl over, under and through one another, creating a feeling of depth in both time and space.

Seacord refers to his painting ability as “a gift,” and he means that in a literal sense. His painting, he believes, is not something that is controlled by his will but rather something that is guided by spirits.

“I’ve had endless hours with … let’s call them the gods of creativity, where I was the brush,” Seacord said.

“It’s not like other art. That’s why I named it modern spiritual impressionism.”

He has hundreds of finished paintings stored on his property — and hundreds more that are unfinished.

On a warm, sunny day this summer, he took a stack of partially completed paintings to his studio to work on them. He picked one out of the pile and held it at arm’s length.

“It has to be 10 years ago that I started this, and I just rediscovered it,” he said.

“I’m looking at it and trying to think: What do I see in it now? It’s a palette of possibilities that I’m working with.”

Seacord is a self-taught artist who uses a number of methods and tools he invented himself, and he’s cagey about disclosing some of his techniques.

But, as you watch him work, what is immediately apparent is his willingness to experiment, to try different things until he gets a result that pleases him.

On this day, he slapped some paint on the unfinished canvas and began to move it around, swirling and blending the colors to see how they mesh with the underlying layers. Unsatisfied, he stripped off most of the paint he’d just added and started again, repeating the earlier process with different colors and variations until he got something more to his liking.

Then he laid the canvas aside and started on another.

When he begins a painting, he’s never sure what the finished product will look like.

“I call it following the beauty — but it’s also following the intuition,” he said, working as he talked.

“I do not have a destination yet. Destinations occur along the way when you begin to recognize patterns that are familiar to you and that you think would be familiar to other people.”

A career interrupted

Even though he began painting late in life, Seacord pursued his art with such passion that he quickly began to amass a body of work that people seemed to respond to. Other artists and gallery owners, he said, told him it was good.

He began to exhibit his work in ranked juried exhibitions around the West, traveling nomad-style from show to show. His paintings started to sell well enough to provide him with a decent living. He began to get a reputation among art collectors in enclaves such as metropolitan Phoenix.

“I was on my way,” he said.

Then something happened that altered his career trajectory.

Seacord’s parents — a retired Methodist minister and his wife — were snowbirds, living most of the year in Prairie City but spending winters in Arizona. But his father began having serious health problems, and in the fall of 2009, he moved to Yuma to help his mother look after his dad.

While Seacord doesn’t regret that decision, it took a toll on him professionally. What he had thought would be a relatively short-term commitment stretched out into years.

As a parental caregiver, Seacord had enough spare time to continue painting but not enough to keep traveling the art show circuit. And he was burning through his savings.

Seacord’s father died in 2010, and about three years later his mother moved into a California assisted living facility.

At this point Seacord was freed from his caregiving responsibilities, but the momentum he had built up in the art world had dissipated, and the money he needed to get back in the game — money for art supplies, for framing, for travel to regional art shows and entry fees to exhibit his work — was gone.

Looking back on that time in his life, Seacord is blunt.

“It cost me my career,” he said.

For the last seven years, Seacord has been living on what he calls “the homestead” — the 6½-acre property in Prairie City his parents moved to after they retired in the early 1980s.

He has a large garden with greens, melons, vegetables, berry bushes and fruit trees. He grows much of his own food, making ends meet with Social Security and occasional work as a piano tuner, his profession before becoming a painter.

Seacord is still producing 40 to 50 paintings a year, but his goals have changed.

He’s stopped trying to get his work into juried shows or exclusive galleries — he doesn’t have the cash to cover the many up-front expenses.

“You’ve got to have capital to play the commercial art game,” he said.

But he still wants to get his art in front of the public.

“The whole point is for the world to find the art somehow,” he said.

A need to be seen

Now, at the age of 76, Seacord can hear the clock ticking. He’s not sure how many more years he has left to keep making art — and he’s afraid he may die before he gets the chance to share his art with the world.

What he wants more than anything is the opportunity to show a representative sampling of his best paintings in a venue where it could be seen and appreciated — perhaps a regional art museum.

If the show is a flop, so be it — at least he would have had one last shot at recognition for his work.

“I’m trying to say to the world, ‘I’m here!’” he said.

“If I get enough respect for my work that I don’t disappear — that’s all I’m really hoping for.”

There was a time when he felt that sort of respect was coming his way.

In 2008, he won the “best in show” painting award at the nationally ranked Salem Art Festival.

In 2010, while he was living in Arizona, the Yuma Art Center hung a 210-piece retrospective of his work. It remains the largest one-man show the center has ever produced.

“It was in that show that I realized the power in my art was in museum shows,” he said.

But his art has evolved since then, Seacord said, and he wants at least one more chance to show the world what he can do.

Can he make it happen in the time he has left? Seacord isn’t sure.

But he feels an obligation to try — not to satisfy his own vanity, he insists, but to give his paintings the chance to live on after he’s gone.

“I have all this art sitting here saying, ‘Are you going to get us out in the world, or what?’” he said.

Seacord knows what happens to artists who spend their entire career toiling in obscurity. When they die, their art dies with them. Their life’s work, perceived as having no value, is consigned to the junk heap — literally.

“You have to be well enough known that your art has achieved some sort of recognition,” he mused. “If you haven’t achieved that level of recognition, then the garage sale or the burn pile is your likely fate.”

“I call it following the beauty — but it’s also following the intuition. Destinations occur along the way when you begin to recognize patterns that are familiar to you and that you think would be familiar to other people.”

— David Seacord

“I have all this art sitting here saying, ‘Are you going to get us out in the world, or what?’”

— David Seacord

More online

To see more of David Seacord’s art, visit his Facebook page or go to his website, davidseacord.com.