Street painting

Edward Seago "Sunlight and Shadow Pin Mill" © The Estate of Edward Seago, courtesy of Portland Gallery www.portlandgallery.com
Image from an exhibition catalogue, Edward Seago by Richard Green gallery, London 1994


I painted yesterday and today in the Boston Public Garden, that's next to the commons. Its Bostons version of Central Park. It was awfully nice being out in the warm spring sun. I got in touch with my inner lizard.
Over the course of the day I talked to about 900 people as I tried frantically to paint a group of flowering trees in front of some of Bostons grand 19th century architecture. The leaves were unfurling as I painted. Every time I looked up it was different. I don't know if the picture is going to work or not. It will certainly need to reprocessed in the studio.

All day long people talked to me and I enjoy that. I have done so much street painting that I am totally comfortable with onlookers. I also have heard all the things they usually say. From the most perceptive like, "Where do you show your art?" to the dumbest " Are you painting this here?"

I hear a lot about peoples own attempts at painting. A woman came up to me today and told me she had been drawing some but tried to paint and it hadn't gone very well. I told her there was no reason to think she couldn't learn it. Painting is no more difficult than ophthalmic surgery or classical violin! I warbled encouragingly.

She can't even conceive of how hard I have worked to be able to do this. Often they say "what a gift" as if I just got out of bed one day and could do it. I know when they say the gift thing, they mean well and that they mean to indicate they think it special and out of the ordinary.

I have noticed a funny sort of phenomenon with painting, at least for me:

It won't stay learned.

Now my father was an eye doctor. Every morning when he got out of bed he knew how to be an eye doctor. He had it down. He didn't go to work some days to discover he hadn't a clue what the hell he was doing. But I do. Some days I wake up and I have no idea how to make a painting. I can make a really fine painting one week and the next I can't. I have many times become aware of a repeated mistake or problem I am having. I work hard to overcome it, and do. Then about a year later there it is again in a painting and I have to beat it back once more.

Sometimes a painter will say to me that they are self conscious about painting where there are crowds of people, because their painting might not come out very well. People generally don't know the difference.I have seen them Ga-ga over a painting that had gone terribly wrong and I have seen them walk by my best work without a glance. Their opinion means nothing. Painting is so far from most peoples daily experience,and they didn't learn about it in school
So I work at being patient with them, and try to remember that I am an ambassador for the painting world when I am meeting people out there.

The newspapers and magazines either ignore painting or only publicize the oddest modern art they can find. The newspapers like a good entertaining story better than the art itself. Usually their writers know nothing about art they just have a job to do and that is to cover paper with print. A photograph of an artist painting outside is a good way to do that.

For many years I had a gallery in Rockport, Massachusetts. One week several people came in to ask me "was that you in the Los Angeles Times?" I would say, no, I don't think so. Then someone brought the LA Times in and showed it to me. I had no idea the newspaper photographer had taken my picture. Rockport was an art colony and tourist town, my picture was often taken hundreds of times a day. But there I was, in the travel and leisure section, full color, front page and above the fold, as they say in the newspaper biz.

It was a nice big picture. There I was working away on a promontory overlooking the historic harbor with the sailboats and the yacht club and all the people and seagulls and lobstermen, all milling around below me. On my big Gloucester easel I have a painting about 30 by 30. I had been working on it for a week and the painting is singing, its as good as I get. You could see the picture and you could see what I was painting beside it. It was a very professional piece of work that won me prizes, and I sold about a zillion prints of it. I kept the painting rather than selling it, so my daughters would have a good one when the death bunny comes hop, hop, hoppin along. Yep, there I was and there was the painting and that fabulous view that had been painted by Aldro Hibbard and Emile Gruppe and Carl Peters and Reynolds Beal.

The caption below the photo read "A local artist tries his hand at oil painting"