Seth Tane

This is my newest painting. The image is a composite built up from many photos I took while looking west down 40th street from the corner of 7th avenue in midtown Manhattan. As I assembled the image before starting the painting, I altered clothing, shadows and positioning to arrive at a scene that never actually existed on that corner in any one moment in time, but captures the dynamic energy and diversity that I like to paint. I shot some of the photos in other parts of the city, near Union Square and in the West Village. No matter how ready I thought I was when out photographing, with one eye looking at the camera viewfinder, and my other eye trying to pick up moving people, vehicles and mobility devices that were entering the scene outside the frame, a great, wildly colored and perfect addition would get by me before I could catch it in motion. And now I've just found a right angle prism attachment for mobile phones that lets me be more discreet when photographing people on the streets and sidewalks. I'm really looking forward to putting it to work in preparation for more paintings.

I painted Midtown Comics while we spent another summer on my liftboat studio Legs III, now elevated at the Riverdale (Bronx) Metro train station, with a fine view of the Hudson River and the skyline of the city beyond the Palisades.

While we were onboard, we were lucky to find a new loft located in lower Manhattan, where every subway line converges and the island is so narrow that you can quickly walk from the East River to the Hudson, or south to the Battery. The tight, winding streets bear historic names and a range of architecture that spans hundreds of years and vary in size from two to many stories. The neighborhood is packed with a wide variety of interesting locals and visitors day and night, and the windows of passing sunlight in the canyons are very short, so it takes many daily walks to catch all the dramatic moments that can occur on a particular street or corner. Our loft is in an old building with a lot of character, and the studio I've set up there is now ready for me to create more painted views of the city.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I just completed this new oil painting in my studio aboard Legs III, an ex Gulf-of-Mexico liftboat formerly used to service oil rigs (scroll down to the last couple of entries for more details). I was moored in Hastings-on-Hudson since my arrival last fall, but in late June I decided to move the rig about 6 miles downstream to Riverdale, NY. The new location is closer to the city by train or in my outboard powered skiff, and there's a beautiful view of the Palisades, the George Washington bridge and the city skyline beyond. It was a great summer aboard, and all the hard work and time spent making the rig ready for the trip to NYC from Louisiana paid off nicely by providing a great live-work space close to the inspiration of the city, and a quiet place on the water to relax and watch the ships and trains go by.

This painting is another look at summer on the subway, when interesting characters in colorful clothes make every ride an entertaining trip.

I'm now represented by LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, NM, a great contemporary space in the railyard district with a long and interesting history. I've got a solo show scheduled for February 2024, please stay tuned for the dates and an invitation.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

We departed New Iberia, Louisiana in late July and motored between the oil and gas platforms along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, around Key West and then all the way up the Atlantic seaboard to New York harbor, a 2,600 mile offshore journey. We lucked out weather-wise, making our 40 day trip in between hurricanes and storms, jacking the rig up very close to the beaches almost every night, providing incidental entertainment for the astounded shore dwellers and tourists who wondered what on earth had just floated in. After arriving in the city, the scarcity of affordable and secure places to park the rig led me to consider some alternatives pending further research and some prospects still in the works. I had fond memories of the Hudson river north of the city from a few years we spent there aboard my first studio-aboard-ship back in the '80s. There's a spectacular view of the Palisades to the west, the sparkling city skyline to the south and the frequent passing trains and river traffic all around. So I chose to elevate the rig adjacent to the Metro North Hudson Line tracks, with a remote controlled gangway to shore for easy access to a nearby century old boat club as a land base, and the Greystone station is less than half a mile away to enable frequent trips to the city.

I've converted one of the cabins on Legs III into a studio and finally gotten back to painting after a long year and a half of work readying the rig for the voyage. I'm easing into my practice by creating a few more small works before returning to larger paintings. I'm also thinking hard about how to make art about my new location, where more than 170 passenger trains pass by the rig every day, along with an occasional freight. I'm fascinated by my view of the passengers in their through-the-window vignettes as they flash by, especially in the twilight of early mornings and at dusk. I ride these same trains to & from the city by walking along the tracks to the station before climbing a ladder to the platform and then boarding the train. Once I claim a seat I've switched points of view, but unlike the other passengers, I'm still mindful of being a watcher from the river just a few minutes ago...my favorite "being in two places at once" mode.

I have paintings hanging in small exhibits in the West Village and in Hastings-on-Hudson for the next few months, please contact me for viewing info.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I'm happy to report successfully reaching a bit of an overdue milestone after months of hands-on hard work in an oilfield shipyard where many liftboats have been born. I jacked my boat down into the canal the other day and motored out for a short trial run, driving the rig solo around the corner to a bulkhead where the yard's largest crane could load my mobile shop-in-a-shipping-container aboard. I was pleased to find that the boat's maneouverability lived up to her reputation as being a favorite in the fleet. Now I can pick up the pace and finish all the remaining work down on the bayou where the weather is usually a little kinder than a NYC winter before my departure in the spring.

I arrived in New Iberia, Louisiana from Portland in mid-April with a truckload of tools and equipment, and a spreadsheet of my anticipated work tasks and budget. There turned out to be more hull repair work than I had planned on, and the complexity of the electrical, piping and hydraulic systems have been a challenge. Add to that my installation of solar panels (temporarily on deck until my cranes are up and running), a 48V battery bank, solar water heating, new appliances, interior modifications and updated navigation electronics among other tasks, and you can begin to understand the slippage in my optimistic ideas about the schedule and budget.

It's been hard to pause my painting practice while I'm concentrating on getting this great new studio and home put together, and then embarking on the coastwise voyage north, but I'm ever more certain it will be a great move. Southern hospitality is more than just an expression, and I've been welcomed and treated royally by all I've encountered, which has made this detour from my usual habitat much easier. I've also made some great trips to NYC as a cultural counterpoint to the shipyard work and to spend time with family and friends, but for now it's a full time push to wrap up the work over the winter.

The State Department's Art in Embassies program is making a short video about my work featuring the Oman embassy exhibition I'm in, and I'll add a link to my website as soon as it's available. For those of you who've always wanted to add some of my artwork to your collection, this a great time to speak up, since I'm putting all I've got into this remarkable project and I can use all the help I can get !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

As I write this, the power has just come back on after six days of not quite cold and dark that I don't remember ordering for my birthday week (I do have a generator, a woodstove and plenty of free firewood). Nothing like a little wake-up call after a year of chaos to make me think about some next-phase life changes. The painting above, Vancouver II shares the view west from Stanley Park in Vancouver, BC. That stone outcropping is Slhx̱í7lsh (formerly Siwash Rock) with a view that includes ships anchored in the roadstead of Burrard inlet and out to the shores of Vancouver island blending into the clouds in the distance.

North-South indeed, and it looks like that's the way I'm headed, since I've arranged to downsize my Portland presence and go mobile. I've made a deal to buy a liftboat, shown here partially elevated out of the Louisiana bayou where it's been sitting along with many others for some years. Happily, it was refurbished just before being parked, and it was very cleverly designed and built for its job of motoring out into the Gulf of Mexico and jacking up in the air. The boats in this 130' (leg length) class are built to work in water as deep as 90', and spend a self-contained week or more with as many as 22 crew and contractors servicing an oil platform or structure while living aboard in relative comfort. Twin screw and self-propelled, they can make about 8 knots underway, and they have some serious BBQ equipment on the back deck, big galleys and lounges and a pilothouse with a commanding view. Twin 50KW generators, air compressors, 10 ton and 25 ton hydraulic cranes, a rescue boat and other features make them the Swiss Army knives of vessels in my book.

I figured this one would make the perfect studio/home for a return to the waters of the 6th Boro, where I have so much going on and a lot of maritime history of my own. So I'm packing up my gear and heading to the shipyard nestled between the sugar cane fields (with roaming black bears) and the idled rigs and equipment stacked everywhere. It will be a couple of months of hard work to ready the boat for the 2,500 mile trip hugging the coastline around Florida and up the eastern seaboard. The voyage should be just about the right speed for some fishing along the way and make for an arrival in NYC waters in early summer. My plan is to install solar power, a watermaker and other amenities to make off-grid living in a variety of locations viable.

One of my heros, John A. Noble spent a lifetime making fabulous drawings, prints and paintings from his barge-studio assembled from derelict vessels in the Kill van Kull between Staten Island and Bayonne/Jersey City. You can visit the amazing houseboat he built now carefully reconstructed and on display with much of his work at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island, a true hidden gem. When I first got back to full-time painting my focus was maritime, and I look forward to revisiting those waters. Stay tuned !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

This work-in-progress is the latest in my series of autogeographical paintings, with a view of about ten miles of Wyoming from a cross country flight a few years back. I've been everywhere, man...and by many means of transport. I never cease to marvel at the expanse of country between the coasts when I fly, watching its unfolding variety and the visible impacts of human activity almost everywhere below. I've painted a few images to capture the density of lives compacted and viewed as landscape before, like the Big Picture, but this larger image from an eastbound flight takes in a far less populated region of the country where the western mountains are giving way to the flatter midwest.

When I fly, I can't help but think about other transits through this territory that I've made on a far grittier scale than being high above it, and a few photos taken in the same area from these trips are shown below. When I lived in Portland in the mid 1970's, I would shake up my routine by hitchinking or hopping freight trains to NYC, where I would go on art adventures and include the purchase of a BMW or Porsche to drive back and sell for a profit in LA or Portland. Sometimes I'd keep a journal of every ride, to accompany the many slides and SX-70's I was accumulating. One trip, I found an army green '63 Ford pickup that had been abandoned in front of my house, so I painted East on one door, and West on the other and made it all the way, collecting signs and other goodies and piling them in the bed. Now I keep a painting journal, and one of the distilled themes I've noted on a "big ideas" list from my entries is the concept I call "My Dirt". Best as I can explain it: that all-encompasing sensation you get from sitting on ground you own, control or inhabit, soaking in the connections to the rest of the universe that begins at its borders, however far-flung or nearby.

The seemingly empty landscape in my painting, with areas in sun and shaded by clouds, high on hills and on lonely roads and watersheds, is somebody's dirt, even if only as the temporary caretakers we all are. The dramas of lives lived, the unfolding of history and the passage of weather, seasons and time are no less remarkable than those in the big cities, where "my dirt" can be just a few square feet on a stoop...

In these unpredicatble and uncertain times many of us miss travel, by whatever means we prefer. I've made two trips from Portland to NYC since the pandemic hit, and travel has become a surreal experience. Let's all hope we can overcome the mess we're in and reclaim our lives and our mobility soon !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I'm very pleased to report that I've received a generous Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. The story of how hard Lee Krasner had to work to maintain her own practice while married to and promoting the career of Jackson Pollock is well known, and a sad reflection of the underlying bias and narrowness of vision that so limited the historical record of creative production we're all left with. That Lee Krasner had the vision and foresight to create and endow the foundation is a testament to her generosity and empathy in sharing their wealth with other working artists in memory of her own experiences. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation has awarded a large number of substantial grants since its creation in 1985 on a rolling admission basis with no fixed submission date. For this I am inspired and grateful, and I encourage every artist who needs assistance and recognition to take advantage of those opportunities that best fit their practice, and to perservere and perfect their submissions with energy and confidence !

In other news, Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts has just launched a virtual exhibition of my work on Artsy and Issuu, I've been included in a group show in the US Embassy in Muscat, Oman (details soon) and I'm continuing to paint a series of new works that include text and a fractured picture plane. I've started messing with 3D virtual reality since everyone is looking at alternatives to in-person viewing of artworks, and all I can report at this point is: what a trip ! Stay tuned. I've also risked two NYC excursions, doing my best to be safe and keeping a low profile in this surreal summer, but I managed to get things taken care of that couldn't be delegated or put off. To all of you on this list, please keep in touch and let's work and hope for a way out of this mess !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Happy Summer Solstice, despite the dark clouds and difficulties of the combined natural and human caused stresses in our world right now. You Just Missed It ! is the painting-in-progress I'm working on as I try to navigate this upending of so many former assumptions about the past, the present and the future. The little slice of NYC revealed in the lower left is a view of 39th and 8th avenue in midtown Manhattan, also visible in my large oil 8th Avenue . In our former world, where there was an inexorable push to demolish older buildings and replace their intricate visual and historical texture with larger, shinier and more expensive iterations, the corner restaurant was one of the casualties, shortly after I took my reference photos. But now much of Manhattan is transformed, along with a lot of other places, and the economic ripples from the pandemic, our political nightmare and our recurring sad history of racism, sexism, injustice, intolerance and inequity are only just beginning to be felt.

Those twin desert hoodoos can be a metaphor: the harder "top rock" protected the softer "bottom rock" from eons of erosion that ground down everything else in it's path. And the wide open but isolated landscape of the desert is a magnificent tonic for being shut-in and sheltering-in-place. I lived in Albuquerque for a bit back in the early '70s, and my explorations and adventures out in the back-country made powerful impressions on me that I'm glad to be able to mine now...but it's up to you to figure out what you just missed !

In the midst of all this, we all have to find our ways to peacefully exist and prosper, and a big part of my long-range plan is to continue to make art. With so much happening around me, I need to process and react to the overload creatively. The rules and recommendations for distancing and isolation have reduced the opportunities for distraction and out-of-studio time, and I know a lot of artists who are more productive than they've been in a long time as a result. Thankfully, I've also had some really good news to offset the clouds, including selection by the Art in Embassies program of the US Department of State for inclusion in a group show at the US Embassy in Muscat, Oman, 2020-2023. Recently I've been notified I'm short-listed for a significant grant to be awarded in late summer, and I was also featured in an online exhibit at ABFA Gallery. The icing on the cake is that today on father's day both my sons are happily sailing on their offshore boats, one on each coast, and it's been great fun to help them restore and refit their vessels as I dig into my stash of marine hardware, connections and experience.

Stay safe and healthy, enjoy the relative quiet and solitude, and let's all work to come out of this with a renewed energy for doing good things in good ways !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I started this painting before the present pandemic changed our world, but after I think I may have actually had a bout of the virus for my birthday in early February, after another of my NYC trips.

Here It Comes...is the second in a new series of works that incorporate or refer to places close to home, in this case the ridge behind my studio. I've been living and working on five acres of hilly field-and-forest overlooking the Columbia River since the early 90's. This patch of trees was planted in a tight grid by the previous owner about a dozen years before our arrival. We've thinned them several times for the health of the remaining trees, the last time shipping out five log trucks loaded with bucked timber we yarded from this ridge down to a landing on the road. Good thing we did it, because the increasingly warmer-drier climate here might have seriously stressed this formerly too-dense stand, as it has many in the region. The view north to the hills exists for now only in this painting, although it was visible back when we moved here and those trees were only ten feet tall. Now the trees on the lower slopes have grown up to obscure the distant view from this ridge, but it remains a knockout vista of snow-capped mountains and the river from other spots on the property.

The machinery in the lower right corner of the painting is the cross-slide and apron of my 1930's vintage lathe, handy for making parts for everything around here. A lathe is said to be the only machine tool that can be used to reproduce itself (at least it was back in the days before 3D machining and printing), and it also serves to call up one of my favorite stories, Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, about dreams that can change reality...

I was in NYC again in early March, flying west on the 14th as the city shut down around me. I was lucky to have been able to see the great Vida Americana show at the Whitney, and the mysterious Agnes Pelton exhibit that had opened for only a few days before the museum was closed. I almost made it to see the Peter Saul blast at the New Museum, but after picking up some electronic parts nearby and grabbing some apparently ill-advised dim sum around the corner, I felt not-so-well and barely made it back to my apartment before symptoms developed that I'll leave to the imagination. I was worried that now I had caught the real virus. It was a tough couple of hours but I came out of it at 3AM ready to fold the laundry and catch up on some computer work. They closed the New Museum for the duration that night, so my chances of seeing the work in person, and a lot of other activities will have to await the "all-clear" and a determination that we have immunity from prior exposure or a miracle vaccine.

Here It Comes... is a reference to a wide range of unknowable and unforseen changes to our world, now upon us in a blink, with a profound global span and an intensity still unfolding that has upended everything we thought we knew and planned for. Many have spoken and written about the pause that has resulted in a big reduction in traffic and pollution, the slowing down of everything (other than the heroic and urgent health care and emergency response) that opens a window into an alternative life that dramatically illustrates the side-effects of constant growth. Let's all use the opportunity to make something better from this forced break in business-as-usual.

I'm featured in a virtual exhibition at ABFA Gallery this month: Urban/Rural , please have a look.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

The painting above is the first in a new series of auto-geographical paintings I've begun after much thought and extensive viewing of the work of many others, as well as my own older pieces. I've always been intrigued by the power of text in a painting, and back as far as '77 I used it in Passage Interdit (below) to heighten the sense of wonder I had on that first (and unbelievably my only) trip to Europe. In thinking about the next steps in my painting practice, I've come to the conclusion that while I've greatly enjoyed painting highly detailed pictures of things I can see in my camera viewfinder, I'm ready for something different in the process and from the paintings it creates. With the resources and experiences I'm commiting full-time to the effort, I want to step it up.

The fracturing of the picture plane is something I used in a series of watercolors back in the 70's too, and I've always liked that kind of enigmatic distruption. This group of oils will include these details that speak to the many levels of my explorations and perceptions drawn from my overflowing library of images. I do love the magic of pictorial space and the drama of representational oil paintings that transcend their somewhat arbitrary borders, and I also tend to see things horizontally. So another part of my review and planning was settling on a size and aspect ratio that facilitates immersion. This is the third recent painting I've done in this format, and I like it enough that I've got a group of about ten in mind. Stay tuned !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

It's been a whirlwind since my last news post, with a slew of trips back to NYC and steady progress in my Portland studio on a new large diptych Parallels, which includes ambient audio accessible via a QR code. For those of you in the NYC area, I've got a solo exhibit opening just after Labor Day on Bleeker Street in Greenwich Village, with a reception on September 19th. Please contact me for details and an invitation.

My watery activities in NYC have gotten a little deeper, with the acqusition of a funky 40' flybridge boat and its private mooring on a Brooklyn creek, donated by an elderly inventor/contractor who gave it to me when I asked him if I could moor my inflatable dinghy alongside. My timing must have been good, because he was retiring to points south, so one morning he put on his suit, took his laptop, and got on a plane after handing me the keys to his boat, his van and all his tools...which led to a whole series of further waterfront escapades in the sweltering heat and humidity of summer in the city. One of them was my foolish offer to help a friend on a job he was bidding to repair damage on a barge moored nearby. I figured I'd at least be able to use my dinghy to commute to the scrapyard where the barge was moored, and indeed it also saw service as a bow thruster and escort tug shifting his 100' workboat into position. All well and good, but the trip from my Chelsea apartment to Bushwick & back on my bike and the erratic L train was a struggle at times, especially when I was lugging heavy tools and gear. On the plus side, I enjoyed getting to know some very interesting neighbors on the creek: a world renowned mural and sign company has its studio nearby, friends live aboard their WWII vintage tug across the way, environmental advocates (and wildlife) paddle by and the crew at the company where the dock is located is great.

I'll be setting up a studio there to take advantage of the situation, and I'm looking forward to starting in on a new body of work soon.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I turned 66 last week, and I'm thrilled to have survived a few months of hard labor building myself a new studio and getting back to making paintings instead of welding, driving screws and being both the rigger & crane operator (no mean feat). It was a true design/build project but the dimensions and layout, lighting and location all came together to make a space that I feel inspired to work in. I hit my marks on time & budget and only sustained a few minor injuries, so I'll call it good for an aging amature.

I started out small as I got back to painting after taking the better part of the year off following my solo show in San Francisco last May to do some logging, fabricating gates and improving roads and paths on the property, and to build the studio and complete the move in. One reason I needed a new studio was for more space, including increased ceiling height to facilitate better lighting, but the other was to get out of the room I was using in our house to change my perspective. Because my location is on a forested hill with epic views, I had no interest in the usual studio in town, with a climate-impacting commute, extra expenses and a loss of spur-of-the-moment access. I’m happy to report it was a good move despite the effort, because I’m now working in a well-designed dedicated space that’s an intellectually and artistically stimulating pleasure without much concern about noise or mess.

After getting everything back in order and starting to remember how to mix and apply paint, I banged out an underpainting for one of my NYC street scenes. Confidence returning, I decided to take advantage of the great new space and get started on a large painting, but my gallery wasn't thrilled about the logistics of handling another large heavy panel. So it evolved that I began my first diptych, a natural (at least in my mind) above & below pair of East-West images connected by steel rails. The underpainting is going well and I'm excited about the progress and promise it holds to be a powerfully engaging experience to stand in front of. I've been working with this theme for a long time through individual paintings, but it sure makes sense to try working with the juxtaposition in closer proximity...stay tuned for new images I'll post as I work on it.

I'm also pleased to be included along with over 50 other realists for the second year in a curated show of small work at the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in SoHo NYC: Size Doesn't Matter: Food for Thought that opens February 28th and runs through March 30th. If you're in the area for the art fairs that begin next week, be sure to see the show !

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Those of you who've known me for a long time are well aware that I have a deep connection to the water. I was in my twenties back in 1979 when my small boat fascination became a little bigger after buying an oil tanker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and towing it over to Jersey City to begin a dream of a live-aboard mobile studio. Years followed in the rebuilding and re-configuring the ship for purposes a bit far afield of my original intention (photos on my about page). I continued to paint and photograph, but increasingly I worked in all manner of marine trades. I did salvage, towing, diving, launch service, line handling, bonded customs deliveries and eventually manufacturing of patented plug-and-play deck structures for research vessels, tugs and marine equipment. I also spent a few years serving as the federal court appointed monitor in a maritime pollution case, sailing on supertankers to and from Valdez AK, Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay.

Eventually I sold the ship and moved ashore, building a steel home on wooded property in Oregon using many of the same tools and techniques common to ship building and marine fabrication, and I finally got back to making art full time. But I still enjoy my days on the water and continue to navigate them in a fleet of small craft, mainly kayaks and hybrid sail boats and a 10 foot/10HP outboard skiff. I use them to get close to ships and waterfront scenes to make paintings.

While on another NYC trip this summer, one of our sons who lives in Brooklyn and I put together another addition to the fleet, a nice little 10' Avon inflatable boat with an 8HP outboard motor to mess around in. He'd been interested in getting out on the water there for awhile, and over a very hot week we inserted our project into a community of ships clustered in a remote backwater tributary of one of the now industrialized creeks that make up the 6th borough. Outboards are a pain to work on, but we got the Honda running after an infusion of parts and sweat, and refurbished the inflatable on the astro-turfed tiki-lounge on the upper deck of an old ferry before tossing it into the funky waters below and rigging it for a great summer of explorations on the rivers around the city.

Those are not easy or placid waters to learn to navigate on, with fast ferries and tug-barge traffic, swift currents, submerged hazards and debris, all heavily policed by security vessels on high alert, making the challenge formidable. Optional for many operators are proper radio protocall (for those who bother to use one at all), correct navigational lighting, and following the maritime rules of the road. I was glad I was able to give our son the short course based on my extensive experience, and fortunately he was a quick study. As it turned out, I got a little more deeply invloved with the crowd on that backwater than I intended when I first eyed it as a likely place to put a boat in the water. I became the marine-therapist-ship-whisperer to the hipster navy...hired to coordinate the wreck removal of a 29' twin diesel flybridge cruiser and consulting on the fate of one of the ships. And then one of the owners decided I should buy their little ferry, since no one else they'd met knew so much about her construction and equipment. I got very close to making the plunge until I did a thorough bilge crawl. Rust never sleeps, and I decided to back away from another project of that scale and get back to painting.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I've been fascinated by railroads since I could walk, and maybe even before that. I've gone into some detail about this subject in prior news posts, like this one from 2015: Tracks. Recently I've returned to exploring the rail lines on both sides of the magnificent Columbia River Gorge, another area of visual interest for me that's fortunately only a short drive from my Portland studio. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe runs on the Washington side of the river and the Union Pacific on the Oregon shore, both carrying many trains a day, with some Amtrak passenger trains joining the more frequent freights on the BNSF tracks. Unit trains, consisting of a single type of car and commodity are over a hundred cars long, and use multiple engines on the head end, in the middle (run by radio remotes) and sometimes on the tail end as a pusher to get over the mountains. This is big-time western railroading that runs on a fine line between safety and commerce, in rugged and scenic country with oil, coal, lumber, autos, potash and agricultural products roaring up and down these tracks perched on rocky shores.

The Cascade Mountain range is the contintental divide at this latitude, with Mt. Hood towering over the gorge and visible from many spots along the tracks and the river. East of the divide near Hood River, OR the thick green coniferous forests quickly give way to desert conditions, with dramatic basalt cliffs and deep side canyons. The rail lines cross the Columbia between Biggs Junction, OR and Wishram, WA on an old steel lift bridge that I walked across back in the '70s. They connect to the big classication yard nestled into the rocky little town of Wishram, where there are buttes in backyards, a monument to Lewis & Clark next to the tracks, and one of the huge steam locomotives that used to run through here now half-hidden under a shelter and behind a fence in the village park.

Even though it's been pushing 100F for weeks, I've been driving up in my mobile studio van and finding open gates that lead down gravel railroad access roads that reveal some powerful vistas and sections of track that are otherwise inaccesible. In some cases, I launch the inflatable kayak I keep in the rig to get to the right point of view, where even the sketchy roads don't go, to shoot stills and video, working to capture the essence of these locations. The intervals between trains are unpredictable, and force a kind of meditative wait, sometimes while keeping my senses tuned to stay out of danger, and sometimes to capture the train in motion as it blasts out of a tunnel hewn in the rocks or over a trestle spanning a rushing tributary creek. Native fishing platforms cantilever out over the river, accessible only from the tracks, and powerful tugs push barges through the locks at the dams heading up and down the river. New paintings based on all of this are in the works. More images and a few videos from these forays can be seen on my Instagram feed.

I'm also making another kind of tracks: I'm very pleased to now be represented by Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts who will be featuring my work in upcoming exhibitions and art fairs, as well as online. Stay tuned for more details.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I've got an upcoming solo show titled Trading Places opening May 10th and running through June 30th at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco that will feature my large oil paintings. If you're in the area while it's up, please stop by and have a look at my work in the gallery's beautiful new ground-floor space at 724 Ellis street.

One painting in the exhibition is Canal & Broadway, shown above and completed in 2012. I was interested in getting a higher vantage point to photograph street scenes long before I developed my Sony-on-a-stick approach, especially where there was an oppportunity to see down into a subway entrance while keeping the sidewalk and street action above ground in view too. The northwest corner of Canal and Broadway in lower Manhattan had been on my radar for awhile, and I'd been casing it for the ideal time-of-day and season to get the the light just right while colorful crowds were present. I decided that noon on a busy weekday in early March around noon was prime time, and I waited for a sunny one. While looking for the right angle to get everything I wanted in the scene, I examined the red fire call-box next to the lamp-post on the corner, and realized I could "chimney" up between them to climb on top of the green signal control box you can see on the left in the photo above. It being New York, (almost) nobody paid any attention to the guy with a camera standing on the box, draped over the crosswalk signal and shooting photographs every which way...except for the proprietors of the souvenir shop on the corner.

The couple that operated the store at the time were a mixed bag, with the woman gesturing and yelling at me to get down, while her oversized male partner stood right behind her making the finger-twirl-in-the-ear crazy sign and pointing at her. By the next year, when I finally got everything lined up right, they had traded places with two more operators...you can see the male half of the pair with his arms folded in center of the photo, giving me the stink-eye. This time his female co-owner was thrilled to have her picture taken and kept posing for the camera, while he kept threatening to call the cops and have me busted. He made it into the painting anyway, with his back to me at the entrance to the subway.

Friends who are passing by and know the story text me photos of the corner that have become a history of commerce in this location. It's been constant change at this shop since I shot the photos and made the painting. Sometimes it's closed and boarded up, sometimes it's back in operation with yet another set of merchants from a different far-away place on the globe, but they always seem to be selling the same stuff.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I turned sixty-five years old a few days ago, just after completing months of work on my large and very detailed 8th Avenue painting. It set me to thinking about my future, and about how far out I can see it. After finishing that painting, I raced off to NYC for another whirlwind trip, and I had just returned when I was able to make a leap into that future, roughing in this new painting in less than a day, based on a photo I had taken when I was camping a few summers ago in Central Oregon.

We left Portland in the late afternoon on a spur-of-the-moment jaunt in my mobile studio, heading east along the Columbia before turning south at Biggs Junction on our usual route to the Priest Hole campsite located at a hairpin bend in the John Day river. As we drove out of the small town of Fossil after grabbing some supplies at the market just before it closed, we scanned the small side roads for a likely looking place to pull off for the night. At the end of one of them we found ourselves at the fenceline and locked gate of a large spread we could barely make out in the distance. The sunsets here in the summer tend towards 9PM, and there's light in the sky past 10. On this particular nearly cloudless and very quiet evening, the intensity of the deep blue sky above, and the golden-orange slice of afterglow below, framed by the wires and poles marching off to the cluster of structures was a powerful metaphor for some big thoughts.

I'm always seeking the disruptive sense of being in two places at once, and this scene, with its distant horizon, triggered a sense of timelessness and contrast with the hectic urban life I so often paint. This expansive vista, seemingly remote from the cities, is in fact connected to them in many ways, including a riot of information flowing down those thin wires overhead and beamed in from satellites. I got a sense of steady forward motion towards that horizon, out there in the future...My plan is to exhibit some of these wide-open landscapes alongside my urban scenes to further explore the contrasts between them.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I'm coming down the home stretch now on this new 4' x 6' oil painting after three months of steady work. Signs have been a lifelong fascination for me, both for their appearance and many meanings. Ed Ruscha, Jenny Holzer, Christopher Wool and Robert Cottingham are some of the better known artists who have worked extensively with semiotics and the visual word. Many times I've wished I could simplify things as elegantly as they have in their very different ways, partially because it would probably speed up my rate-of-production...but alas I'm still exploring more complex imagery in my own quest to consider words as elements of a bigger picture.

Some of the most painstaking parts of my painting process are the multiple overpaintings of text, where high contrast juxtapositions of intense colors so essential to legibility in the signs create an extreme technical challenge. I've found I have to carefully lay in the lighter of the letters or the background first, and then work the wet darker color up to the edges of the first one while not allowing any smearing to mix the two. It usually takes lots of small corrections before all the letters are correctly shaped, spaced and proportioned, and then all those junctions between the two colors need a final gentle blending pass to make them "read" properly, or the sharp demarcation will distract the eye and ruin the effect. In an earlier post I discussed the complications in this already difficult process when I've painted signs in languages with different character sets like Chinese: Chinatown

Another aspect of my paintings I've written about previously has come up in this one as well, and that's my knack for catching scenes I carefully select as having the right amount of visual texture that turn out to be just about to change forever, despite, or perhaps because of their decades of existence. In this case, I shot the reference photos last June. When I paint I get curious about the businesses, buildings and other identifiable details and I'll confess I sometimes call the number on a sign while I'm painting it thousands of miles away in my studio, just to see if I can deepen the connection.

Several times it's led to interesting conversations and new followers, but once again, this time the fried chicken place was gone just six months later because it had been replaced by yet another upscale chain eatery. The new spot had also displaced the other two ground floor tenants on W39th street, a shoe repair and a fabric shop. I did a little exploring online and by using the NYC tax lot database (endless hours of fun) I could see that the 20 story building on the corner had been built in 1925 and was actually L-shaped so it didn't include the liquor store, set into the notch. Since it had survived, I called and got the clerk, who filled me in on the recent changes on the block. Once again I'm glad I captured the scene before it vanished and that I was able to "preserve" so many of its details.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

My last two posts relate the perfection and deployment of a camera-on-a-stick as way to elevate my point of view when aquiring images for paintings. The just completed 4' x 6' oil on panel underpainting shown above features the view looking south at the oncoming uptown traffic on 8th avenue at 39th street I shot using the new camera rig. It may not be readily apparent, but it's a challenge to get an accurately aimed, high resolution image in low light, while paused mid-intersection in Manahttan traffic...trust me. But the results were worth the challenge as I rode my bike (you can see it locked behind the trash can in the center) to each new location on a steamy June evening closing in on midnight.

This image captures the multi-ethnic throng as people carry on in and out of doors in the heat and humidity of New York at night, as traffic moves or waits its turn in the grid, lit by the signs and streetlights. As I work on these large, detail-filled paintings over the months it takes to create them, I'm always absorbed watching the details resolve as I go through the stages from rough underpainting to final glazes. Sometimes an area begins as mere blobs of color, and as I work it up, a face emerges, and even later on a glint in an eye reveals the direction of a gaze, and this triggers a memory of the moment when I first saw the scene. The daily practice of prepping materials and dithering around the studio before actually committing to the first paint laden brushstroke is a kind of ritual. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have an intern or assistant, but I've come to think I need those quiet, contemplative slots to warm up and get ready to make the magic. I'm also not sure I'd be comfortable assisgning grunt work like applying and sanding gesso or digital file management to someone else to endure, or how they could stand my thinking out loud.

While painting I sometimes get curious about a sign, shop or vehicle and try to make out a phone number or address so I can contact the relevant party and share the image with them. Some amusing conversations and follow up contacts have resulted, and they help "populate" the image even more for me. I'm also curious about the smaller stores and shops lining these streets, how they survive the astronomical rents, random difficult patrons and other challenges. Some seem to have so little traffic, or their customers make purchases so small that I can't make the arithmetic work as to how they can keep the lights on, let alone pay themselves. What they add to the visual texture of the city is priceless though, and I'm glad not everything has been homogenized by the relentless appetite of franchises and chains. Many of the locations I've chosen to paint change shortly after my capturing the images. Signs are altered or removed, buildings are torn down and replaced, and I've unwittingly created an historic record. I'm doing my best to preserve and share as much of my sense of wonder and the complete experience of these places through these paintings, hopefully it's working...

For those of you in the Charleston SC area, please come visit a special one week exhibition of my recent work at Helena Fox Fine Art that opens with a reception on Friday, Nov 3rd and runs through Friday November 10th.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I think I see things in sharp focus across my entire field of vision, but I know I'm actually building a serial composite image as I move my head and concentrate on various details that attract my attention. I also take in the entire scene in a kind of willful straight-ahead stare that lets the edges go out of focus. Photographers reviewing lenses rave about their artistic Bokeh, a term derived from the Japanese word for blur that describes how out-of-focus points of light and reflections are rendered by the lens and captured by the camera.

When I recently wanted to take reference photographs of crosswalk signs from an elevated point of view (see the post below) that include the surrounding street scenes at the edges, I knew I was going to have to select a specific distance from the lens to be in sharp focus, and because of the limitations of the equipment, everything else would be pretty blurry. I'm interested in making the illuminated sign the primary element in these compositions, so it makes sense to hold that plane in sharp focus and let the faces, vehicles and architecture around the edges get fuzzy. Given that most of my paintings have been mostly in sharp focus across the range of "depth" in the scenes I create, it might be a surprise that I aspire to painting more loosely, but I find it very challenging. 15 Seconds is the first of these crosswalk images and I really enjoyed all the wet-in-wet blending to make the transition at the edges of areas of color read properly. I use paints made with walnut oil, which keeps them wet longer than more commonly used linseed oil colors, enabling lots of going back into a boundary area and smearing the colors together without (too much) trouble. The M. Graham paints are locally made in a small plant I visited when I first heard about them. I've been delighted with their intense saturated colors as well as their long open time and non-yellowing whites.

I was recently in San Francisco delivering work to Modernism Gallery, where I'll be having a solo exhibit in the spring of 2018, and I greatly enjoyed another look at SFMOMA's extensive collection of Gerhard Richter "blur" paintings. He's a master of many kinds of painting, and during the period where he painted representational images, many were carefully made to look out-of-focus, and are hauntingly effective. Richter blur paintings

I'm also included in an exhibit of three painters running from September 20th through October 20th in eastern Washington, and a solo exhibit at Helena Fox Fine Art in Charleston, SC in early November where 15 Seconds will be featured. Please contact me for information about the receptions and lecture details.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I've been interested in getting a view of the action from a viewpoint a little higher than eye level, and drones are cool, but they're too dangerous (and not legal) just above the heads of pedestrians and traffic in the dense urban settings I'm looking at. I've used my stepladder to good effect, but now I wanted to shoot from the middle of intersections and easily cover big parts of town looking for certain combinations of features. I also wanted to be up around the 12' level, too high for my lightweight ladder, and anything bigger would be a pain to lug around, not to mention be unusable and unsafe in crowded intersections.

So I spent a few days fooling around with my Sony a7 camera, eventually doing some amusing sidewalk "machining" of found bits gleaned from the dismembered & abandoned bikes that adorn so many sidewalks in the city. I needed an adapter for the mount that would enable me to look up at the camera high up on a pole and still see the LCD screen when it was tilted downwards. I used c-clamps to hold the part to a no-parking sign, and with a cordless drill and some files I finally got it perfected. After finding I could velcro the pole to my bike for rapid transport without descending into the sweltering subways, I was ready to test the rig. I rode down to a West Village intersection on 6th avenue I'd scouted, locked up the bike, attached the camera to the pole and stepped off the curb. I tried to trigger the remote while squinting up at the tiny image on the LCD but it wasn't working despite prior tests back at the apartment. I must have looked pretty weird even for the Village, doing my dance waving the remote around while holding the camera on a stick.

I packed it up and headed over to a nearby pro photo equipment store for a hot-shoe mounted remote receiver, where the guy at the counter said "Why aren't you controlling that wi-fi camera with your phone ?" In seconds, he had me install a free app that did the job. You get live action view over wi-fi, and shutter control from anywhere in range with the extra benefit of auto upload to a cloud back-up of every shot, in case something bad happens out there...So I went back out and it worked flawlessly, enabling all sorts of great views down into the subway entrances and the street at the same time, with complete portability, as long as you watch your turning radius with the bike mounted pole, Sir Lancelot.

The first image below is a test of what I was after in the first place, fodder for a new series of 24" x 36" oil paintings of these signals, with the displays varied from the norm, and the blurry marginalia hinting at specific locations. The other images are some of the scenes from that first night out on the town to see what I could see from up there...and yes, I shot the photo of myself using the pole mounted camera using a second setup.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Towers fascinate me. Elegant and minimal in their use of raw materials to trace the critical stress diagram of winds and other loads, they're line drawings of engineering. It only adds to my appreciation that they can be built out of a pile of angle iron and nuts & bolts for "easy" transport and set-up anywhere. In an earlier era, they were riveted together, and I'm always looking out for the visual joy of the rivet shadows and patina of the older towers on my travels. In the waterfront rail yard in Jersey City where we lived on our ship in the early '80s, there were very tall lighting towers with a spetacular view of lower Manhattan that had a 4' x 8' platform at the top where a visiting friend once spent the night. I only wish I'd had the means to preserve one...But perhaps good things do come to those who wait.

While in NYC recently I was lucky to find a 36' tall riveted tower accessible with a little effort and in good enough condition to encourage some serious thinking about it as sculpture. The rendering in the photo shows it installed on a buried steel base to counter-balance the oblique lean I'm interested in. I've also fooled with several variations of added glass insulators, copper rod elements, bases and even kinking it in the middle, while I'm working on the logisitics and finding a home for it. It's a presence that speaks of obsolescence, communication and transportation in our new wireless world. On my long drives I frequently follow many miles of abandoned telegraph poles with multiple wires in disarray along the rail lines and wonder what happened during the transition to leave all that copper and infrastructure in place to decay.

Not to leave it at just one tower, my son alerted me to a Craigslist ad for an 80' galvanized steel one much closer to home at a local scrapyard. That one turned out to be a modern, bolted beauty in perfect condition that I was able to buy for a song and quickly dismantle, load and transport home working alone, after it had been taken down and separated into four sections. It was originally used for training wind turbine technicians but has too many possibilities to sort out at the moment, including using the lower 20' or 40' of it to build a fire-lookout studio/cabin on and making sculpture out of all or part of it. It awaits behind my shop with one section dismantled, two upright for climbing and consideration, and the top on it's side looking like a ready-made of significant proportions.

A round about way indeed to all of this heavy metal distraction from my painting, which is still a full-time effort. Have a look at the most recent batch of five little ones here: https://www.sethtane.com/work, and note the tower on the right side of https://www.sethtane.com/work/hudson-line- and https://www.sethtane.com/work/woodhaven-line, sisters to Tower Oblique, it all connects. In a big way. What underlies what and how I see the world around me has a lot to do with a lifetime of direct, hands-on experience with tools, grease and patience. I paint from that perspective, drilling each hole in the bridge, welding the beams with my brush. Even at this late date I still keep my hands in it. After we thinned a few acres of replant fir trees on our property a few years back I decided I liked log skidders and kept a lookout for that mythical $1,000 skidder with my name on it. I found it, along with another one within a couple hundred miles of the ranch and bought the pair of them to end up with one keeper. That one had ingested several gallons of rain water through an uncovered air intake for a few years and was seized up tight, which served to conceal many other operational problems. The other machine was supposed to be a runner, but it took some epic long hours in a field playing Detroit diesel mechanic by flashlight after midnight to get it barely mobile enough for the trucker's impending dawn arrival. They say 2-strokes don't build up HP unless you "drive it like you stole it", so I spooled it up and made a charge at his tilt-deck trailer with wanna' be brakes and sketchy steering. Boy howdy have I spent a few moments since wondering why, but so far, so good. She runs, drives and drags timber again.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

My relationship with New York goes back a long way, to when I was born there in the early '50s. I can clearly remember looking and longing west towards a mythical image of California as I pumped harder on our backyard swing-set as a five year old. I waited until 2:30AM after high school graduation to make my escape from the suburbs of Long Island to wilder western lands on the only vehicle I had, a bicycle with 60 pounds of camping gear, much of it made in the independent study industrial design class I'd also created in my senior year.

But I've returned many times, once for most of the '80s, converting and re-building the oil tanker I'd bought as studio-home and salvage ship in Jersey City, Hastings-on-Hudson and eventually, Charleston SC. Recently I've been spending a week or two at a time in Chelsea, traveling outward into the boroughs and Jersey by subway, PATH, ferry and bike, with enough comfort and familiarity to feel at ease, but with the eyes of an outsider.

I write this from my apartment there, about to return to the Northwest, where multiple projects await, and it has been an extraordinarily fruitful visit. The driver for the trip was the delivery and installation of my latest large painting in lower Manhattan, and the crating for shipment of another. Unfortunately, it all had to be re-scheduled at the last minute because of an impending snowstorm. I flew in just ahead of it, rented a truck, and got the painting wrapped inside the six-foot, 375 pound crate from the freight forwarder to its new home before the blizzard began.

Then I had time to be at the opening of the Whitney Biennial and see the galleries, but more importantly, put in time with my camera soaking up images for new paintings and working on the logistics for fabricating and siting a new 36 foot tall steel sculpture in the NYC area. The images above are some of hundreds I took in an attempt to capture the full spectrum of our interaction with our surroundings, amplified by the density and pace inherent in all that is New York...in its cold-weather mode this time.

And if you happen to be in or near NYC next month, I've got several of my small paintings in a group show at Bernaducci Meisel gallery on 57th street from Apri 6 - 29th.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

As I continue to work on large, detailed paintings of complex scenes, deep spaces and people in motion, I've been also working on finding ways to aid the process. At first I'd print out high resolution digital ink-jet copies and use a magnifying loupe to examine a detail more closely. It didn't take long before I was zooming in on sections on the computer and using software to crop and re-touch details to optimize them for the inherent distorions of color balance, contrast and brightness before printing dozens of details for each painting.

I'd clip each detail to my hand palette and work until I was "out of the frame" for that printed detail, and then have to move on to the next one I had ready, or stop the flow of painting to go through the process of creating another stack to work from for a few days. Recently I realized the translation and adjustment from the computer screen to the printer (let alone from the actual scene to the camera to the computer) was a waste of time, paper and ink. If I could find a way to load several variations of the scene into a mini-tablet mounted on a flexible holder, I could pan and zoom at will, not to mention change brightness, contrast and color balance on the fly.

A little trial and error with a mock up version, followed by some farm-grade machining and fabrication in the shop yielded the perfect holder for a Craigslist iPad mini-2 with its high resolution screen and the inexpensive Pixelmator app to enable infinite zooming...held to a gooseneck from a shop light with a switchable magnet. I still have to perform all the usual mental and visual gymnastics to translate the transmitted light image and colors to a reflected light image in oil paint as I go, but it's a vast improvement over my previous system.

This painting is about a month away from completion now, and as the overpainting continues to develop and the details emerge from the gestures of the initial sketch, I always marvel at how the effort is repaid in the depth and richness of the overall effect in the entire painting. There's no shortcut or substitute for a complete understanding of what I'm painting months (or years) after I took the source photographs and fully experienced the scene in person, but the new system is a big help.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

The underpainting above represents about two weeks of work on my latest attempt to capture a vibrant NYC street scene at night.

The subways in NYC emerge from underground in various parts of the five boroughs to become elevated lines, running for miles on riveted latticework structures through neighborhoods at the third or fourth story level of most adjacent buildings. For a long time, I've been as interested in the elevated stations, platforms, walkways and signal towers as I have been in the underground portion of the system.

A few years ago I was looking for aerial vantage points (that didn't involve drones) of an elevated station to take reference photos for paintings when I first found this location, the first stop in Brooklyn on the J, Z, and M lines after crossing over the East River on the Williamsburg bridge. I've done several paintings of the view down the tracks topside on various lines, but I also wanted to do one of this station from the roof of one of the buildings just to the south on Marcy Avenue. I picked out a likely vantage point using Google Earth, but when I went in with my camera, the guy behind the desk had only one answer for every question I tried to ask, even before I could finish them: NO. Eventually he put me on the phone with his boss, who was on the same program. So I gave up and went across the street to the housing project, where I snuck in behind a resident to find the roof access door unlocked. Bingo, glorious views down at the station and for miles in every direction. I did this little painting from one of the great angles up there: Marcy Avenue.

But now I was interested in the scene underneath that elevated station, at night. My last large painting of a night scene in Manhattan, Lafayette & Canal was based on photographs taken in the winter, when everyone was bundled up in black, brown or grey. But the summer brings out color and skin everywhere, so my last trip in late August was ideal for photography of the action on the stairs, sidewalks and in the street as trains going in both directions stopped overhead. I spent several hours at a time, several days in a row there, initially working the sidewalk in front of the stores looking up the stairs, the view in the photo above. Eventually I settled on the angle from halfway up the stairs across the street as seen in the painting. While I'd wait between trains for more people to be on the stairs, I'd buy a snack from one of the markets and pace slowly up and down the block.

One by one, the shopkeepers, or a neighborhood "enforcer" would amble up to me and stand a little too close, look me up and down and say "Who ya' workin' for ?" or "You from aroun' heah ?" My reply, "You like pizza ?" would put a stick in those spokes, to which they'd all reply, "Yeah, why ?" Then I'd pull a postcard of my painting Dollar Slice from my back pocket and tell them, "This is a painting I did of another shop I made famous, and yours is next." Sometimes it took a few tries before they got it, but eventually they'd smile and shake my hand, and several offered a soda or other refreshment to beat the heat & humidity. Nice.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

For a long time I refrained from including faces and figures in my paintings, but eventually I realized that this omission wasn't so much an intentional one to emphasize the mood, as it was my inability to paint them as convincingly as I was learning to paint the inanimate world. We're biologically tuned to the facial expressions and gestures of our bodies, and we learn to use them to communicate universally across languages and cultures intentionally and otherwise. I knew as I looked at the scenes full of people that excited me I was going to have to face up to the challenge soon.

Painting faces and figures is difficult, and learning how can be approached in many ways, the most common being the classical route of life drawing and anatomy studies to build an intuitive understanding of the underlying structures and their interaction with light and shadow. While I did some of that in my foundation year at RISD decades ago, I still haven't managed to return to it in my recent efforts to develop a host of other skills to serve my ideas of how I want my paintings to look. My initial path to painting faces and figures has been through creating compositions by assembling elements from a series of photographs into a single image to serve as the framework for a painting. I've got a lot more to learn, but I'm sure enjoying my progress so far.

It's rare that everything in a scene is perfectly captured in one reference photo, especially in a dense image packed with random objects, people and action. When a location captures my interest, I'll frequently return to it when conditions are right and set up my camera on a tripod to preserve the framing to enable shooting many iterations of the same scene as people (and their conveyances) come and go. With the framing constant I can select, add, and change anyone and anything in the view with relative ease in post-production. The photos above are in my queue as source material for new paintings. Have another look at my latest street scene painting, Lafayette & Canal http://www.sethtane.com/work/lafayette-canal to see a montage that was created by changing the cast of characters to suit my intent.

My central interest in these complex images is to create the entire scene in what would normally be many individual paintings all rolled into one. I'm after causing the "experience" of these locations to re-occur for the viewer, and to that end I've been experimenting with audio recordings I've made on location that are played while the paintings are viewed. The conversation fragments in multiple languages backed by the dynamic movement of sirens and street traffic certainly add a bit of appropriately low-tech virtual reality to the program...

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

It was an unusual heat wave with temps in the upper 90s when I rolled down Clay street in San Francisco's Chinatown a few years ago and caught this scene. The signs, facades, pedestrians and vehicles all the way down to a snippet of the view clear across the bay to Oakland were a dizzying challenge to paint, and it took me nearly 8 months of full time work to get it finished. Happily, I've learned to pick up the pace a bit these days, but during all that time I got curious about the Chinese lettering...how would my attempts to paint the signage be affected by my lack of knowledge about how the characters should look ? If I saw a highly representational painting by an artist who wasn't a native english writer with lots of signs and text, and there were even relatively small errors in spacing, letter proportions and forms, they would disrupt my appreciation of the painting. I didn't want to be guilty of the same thing in reverse, so I sought out help from a young Chinese graduate student I happened to meet at a maritime meeting to have a look at the painting in progress.

He came to my studio and brought a friend with him, and they both agreed that I was wise to have asked the question. When students first learn to write Chinese characters, they are taught that the order in which the strokes are made govern the legibility of the characters and form the habits which become memories of how to write them. There are many dialects of Chinese, and the same characters are used in all of them and also in some other Asian languages. Many cannot understand the differences across the spoken dialects and languages, but often can read or write at least the primary core characters.

I've also tried to practice my few phrases of spoken Chinese, mostly related to ordering food and pronouncing names, which frequently leads to amused looks and sometimes the intended result. I've had to seek out help once again as I work on my latest Chinatown painting, the Manhattan night scene featured in my last post, Lafayette & Canal. One phrase of four characters repeated in this painting both vertically and horizontally on the sign above and the neon in the window of the New Hon Wong restaurant at 244 Canal street can be translated as: Famous Roast Meat
(Cantonese Style).

Another great investigation borne of the curiosity about what I was painting in the SF piece invloved finding a supervisor at MUNI to explain all the parts of the overhead wiring system for the buses and streetcars and their vernacular names. This lead to an invitation to bring the completed painting to the maintenance shops where they had a complete replica of a segment of the system installed in the building for training the crews. Everyone got a big kick out of seeing the painting and checking out the details.

Both of these paintings have turned out to be records of particular moments in time, since the signage and buildings are constantly evolving as businesses change and development marches onward. Stockton & Clay, S.F. can currently be seen at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco and Lafayette & Canal will be joining it upon completion this summer.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Yes, it's been a few months since I've been able to post an update on my latest work, but I had to take a break in my mad dashing back and forth to turn bionic, by way of succumbing to a pair of surgeries to have two total knee replacements installed. It's now been six weeks since the successful implants and I'm back on my feet and in the studio as well as driving again. I've been happily working on the painting above, Lafayette & Canal, a new large piece about the the street scene in Manhattan's Chinatown just after one of this winter's big snowstorms. This is the first stage, the underpainting, hence the rough brushwork and sketchy details. If you click on the WORK tab you can see the progress I've made since this posting as I update the images.

The process of re-learning to walk has been a humbling challenge, but I can already feel the improvement in my gait and the absence of pain when walking downhill that made me willing to endure the surgeries and the long recovery in the first place. I'm already looking forward to greater mobility than I've known in many years, which should enable even more foraging for compelling imagery in interesting places...

Ever since I returned to painting full time I've kept a journal in the form of a searchable, cloud based document to capture the epiphanies and observations that bubble up while painting or after looking and thinking. As time passed, the journal grew to contain certain nuggets of distilled central themes and concepts that drive my art-making. Now I also keep a list of those core ideas as another kind of journal that I use as a reference of significance to test my choice of the next painting against. My hope is to stay true to those themes, and not fall into the enticements of pure decoration and representation.

One entry on my short list is: Pavement is a Metaphor. The asphalt & concrete underfoot is a record of our passage in time and place. The load bearing surfaces, repairs, wear marks, painted lines, dropped items and incidental debris are time-based art for me. Another entry is: Make the Effort. This is an admonition to turn around and capture those outstanding moments of confluence that I encounter, even if it means going back an exit on the highway, getting off the train, or turning around while walking (hopefully without incident). It means having a camera at the ready and taking the time to make sure I'm not missing a message meant for me...

These two paintings came from a recent walk to make the effort to explore in an off-the-beaten-path part of Queens that surrounds the Long Island Railroad yards. Overpasses for streets and elevated subways vault the many tracks in the yards, and we scrambled up the embankment to get to an abandoned set of rails called the Montauk Cutoff that curves up and out of the thickets to cross a nearby tributary of Newtown Creek. Views of the Manhattan skyline to the west peek through the hulking industrial landscape and the low angle winter sunlight made everything look rugged and dramatic.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

In the fall of 1979 I sold my two ramshackle houses in Portland to the Oregon highway department so they could build a freeway offramp. I went looking in Seattle and Vancouver and across the northlands to NYC before I found the kind of small ship I was looking for as a replacement home and studio. It was a small oil tanker built in 1937 with ample quarters and spaces for shops and studios, a badly damaged 22 ton engine and a steel hull that turned out to have some pretty thin spots. I bought it for a song and had it towed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where it had most recently served to store oil from ships being worked on in drydock, to a pier on top of the Holland tunnel in Jersey City.

The wharf was 1,000' long and a remnant of a vast universe of railyards, ferry terminals, docks, transfer bridges and maintenance sheds in various states of abandonment and decay. The Hudson's slips on both sides of the North River held all manner of floating, sunken and in-between boats, barges and ships, while the hundreds of acres of uplands were home to scattered blocks of buildings we mined for steel and equipment, and wide open fields we used as our dirt bike race tracks. A dramatic backdrop to our five years of rebuilding the ship there was the knockout panoramic view of the west side of Manhattan from midtown to the trade towers. They had to look at us...and the old Magic City tanker truck body on our neighbors' pier said it all.

We cruised and explored every inch of those shorelines day and night and in every season in a variety of small sail and powered craft in search of stuff for our project and for exploratory diversions. The scale of hundreds of years of crumbling left-behind wood, concrete and steel infrastructure seemed overwhelming and insurmountable. We guessed it would take decades and untold millions for it to be reclaimed, but once it got underway it happened fast. After we had reduced our acculmulated collection of spares and rolling stock, it still took three trips with the now re-built ship to transfer our operations upriver to Hastings-on-Hudson before eventually sailing down the coast one icy February morning to relocate amongst the porpoises & palmetto trees in Charleston, SC for awhile.

Luckily we photographed and filmed that crazy scene constantly, even as it became the last glimpse at the end of an era. Piers were torched and burned for days, demolition crews and scrappers dynamited whole blocks at a time and then the new glass and steel towers went up.

The five paintings in this series are some of the many images I've begun to mine again as painting sources, thirty five years after the fact. A few photos of the ship and our exploits can be seen in the slide show here: ABOUT

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Buying and selling, especially the open air variants, are everywhere. There are the roadside hawkers of woven baskets alongside dusty rural lanes and the spread-on-a-blanket books, audio media and collections of personal detritus for sale on the sidewalks of most cities. A step up are the armadas of wheeled conveyances dragged, towed and pushed from far flung overnight resting and provisioning halls to their claimed corners and favorite spots every morning. Yet another rung up gets you an open fronted stall in a warren like the one in this painting of the Phoenix Mall located on the southeast corner of Lafayette and Canal in Manhattan.

When I was very small I would visit my maternal grandparents in their tiny grocery store in the Bronx and marvel at how it all worked. My grandmother could add up a bill in her head faster than any ten-keyer or cash register, and just as accurately. To this day, despite much observation, reading, and first hand experience in service and manufacturing operations of my own I still scratch my head at the wild range of styles and magnitudes that comprise the worlds of business and commerce. Hundreds of millions of dollars are paid to some very young founders of internet startups that haven't a clue of how to sell anything other than their firms, and elsewhere whole families struggle to keep the lights on working crushing hours to extract a miniscule profit from the margins they manage to find between buying or making and selling.

I've had a rich life, and aquired lots of stuff related to various enterprises, but never had much cash, so I tend to live pretty frugally. I still fall prey to the pleasures of the street, though. In my early teens I'd frequently make my way via bike and train to Canal street to begin a long stroll past all the hardware, machinery surplus and junk shops that used to line both sides of the street for many blocks in those days. Sometimes my eyes were bigger than my wallet and I'd end up selling pen and ink sketches for fifty cents at Grand Central station to raise enough for train fare back home. And I've still got some of those gizmos, too...

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Railroads hold a special fascination for me, often evoking strong and wonderful feelings about places and travel despite some dark environmental realities. I can vividly recall being thrilled at seeing a steam locomotive pulling a train on the Long Island Railroad when I was waiting at a grade crossing in the 1950's. I've hopped freight trains and ridden from coast-to-coast and on short trips many times. The Santa Fe railyard was next to my little adobe house in Albuquerque and sometimes I'd grab the twice daily coal train to LA and back, riding through the Mojave desert in comfort in one of the multiple (unoccupied) engines they needed to get over the mountains.

My first freight ride was out of Portland, heading back east to attend the Rhode Island School of Design as a freshman in the late summer of 1971. I'd been hitchiking and camping my way through the west and was told not to risk the Southern Pacific out of San Francisco because I'd get kicked off the train in Sparks, Nevada where they trained their yard bulls (RR police). Everyone said the Burlington Northern out of Portland was the road to ride so I headed that way.

Standing in the railyard not far from where I live now (and the engine in the painting above was idling recently), I tried to hide my purpose by sketching trains and asking a worker where I could find one facing east so the light would be right. Not that trains in a yard face their eventual destinations, but I was new at this. As he paused to think about which way east was, two dudes wandered up with full backpacks, folding lawn chairs and a case of beer. They asked him which track the hotshot to Interbay yard in Seattle was on, and he pointed and said they'd better hustle, because it had just finished being made up and it could leave any moment. They thanked him and beat feet in that direction, leaving me to figure out how to tell him not to bother with my question and to try and catch up to them. I stammered out something lame and jumped on as the cascading steel-on-steel bangs of the slack being taken up from all the couplings echoed down the line and the train began to roll out of the yard and onto the main line.

On another cross country trip some years later I climbed on the roof of a boxcar to shoot sets of stereo 3D slides for later use in my sculptures while the train raced across North Dakota at 70mph. Recently I proposed painting large single words on a series of new white railcars at the factory so they could be combined at random in the yards like the refrigerator poetry magnets to create rolling messages across the country. The railcar manufacturer liked the idea, but the time frame was too tight for it to be realized as part of the exhibition we were working on at the time.

If you look at early 1900's railway maps of the US, the density of mainlines and spurs is truly staggering, but only a tiny fraction are still in service today. I keep my eyes open whenever I'm near the tracks that remain to see what might be there, and every so often something perfect comes into view that turns into another painting...

Please take this new searchable website design for a test ride. As many have requested, note that by clicking the arrow at the upper right of each of these news posts, a link is created for easy forwarding.

My work can be seen at the following galleries:

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

My hand-held gallery (see the post below) is fine for the little ones, but I also needed a way to safely transport and show the larger paintings to collectors, gallerists and curators. So I took a high top Sprinter diesel van and set it up as a rolling gallery and mobile studio a few years ago that I've really enjoyed travelling in. It does fine off road in the boonies as well providing an incognito base of operations in dense urban environments and it's nimble, comfortable and reliable. When Tesla comes out with a drop-in electric replacement for the long lived and pretty thrifty stock fossil burner I'll make the conversion and keep on truckin'.

I've built an aluminum decked "second story" on the roof rack complete with portable railings for use as a photography and painting area with an elevated view, and it serves as a tent platform in warmer weather too. There's also a davit for hoisting up various watercraft including my sailing trimaran kayak for maritime explorations. The interior is convertible to various configurations and includes powerful LED lighting, a bunk, swiveling seats, a folding bicycle and other necessities for extended trips. Modular storage tubs stow gear in various compartments and pull down shades and curtains can be used to wall off the space into a smaller gallery and living quarters.

For those of you in the Portland, Oregon area, I have 30 paintings up at a large shared workspace in the Pearl District. Please contact me directly for information about this exhibit. I also have a painting in the summer group show through August 29th at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. Modernism

My work can also be seen at:

Helena Fox Fine Art, Charleston, SC Helena Fox

And as always, you can also contact me directly: Seth Tane

Several years ago I was looking to find ways to show galleries and collectors my work that went beyond the usual low resolution web and email formats. Online viewing is a pale comparison to the experience of seeing all the detail and nuances of the actual paintings. Then I hit upon the idea of the Hand Held Gallery. The first version was able to hold four of my small framed oils in an aluminum case I built that had clear plastic sides. When my solo show was up for six weeks in the Flatiron district last spring I used to regularly walk across town on 26th street from my apartment in Chelsea to the gallery carrying the case. As I'd stroll past the lines of people waiting to be in the studio audiences where several television shows are filmed, including the Rachael Ray and Wendy Williams programs, each time several women would ask where they could get a purse like that...

I began to realize I was a performer in a kind of conceptual dialog. Once I got tuned into it, I saw that certain kinds of people would begin looking at the unusual case from as far as half a block away. If I followed their gaze and made eye contact, by the time we were within range we had already established a connection that transcended the well known bubble of personal space nearly all New Yorkers maintain to cope with the crush. A smile and a subtle twist of the case to expose the contents invariably resulted in a closer look, and frequently a conversation wherein I could give the viewer a short explanation and a postcard. Priceless.

The four-banger was a little heavy to carry, and the two paintings in the middle hidden, so I tweaked the program by building a new version set up for just two paintings back-to-back in a clear polycarbonate box. This version has been even more effective, since it can be slipped into a day pack when it would be best kept hidden and employed when the time and location are optimal. I select the "show" of the two paintings to be featured based on my plans for the day, and am never dissapointed with the results. As a conversation starter and a way to sidestep the barriers we tend to erect against unwanted intrusion it's a secret smart weapon, always ready for action. On the subway or train, walking the streets, viewing work in galleries and museums, it earns its keep and makes friends everywhere.

For those of you in the Portland, Oregon area, I have 30 paintings up at a large shared workspace in the Pearl District. Please contact me directly for information about this exhibit.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

In Late April I was back in NYC to see some great shows, including the opening of the new Whitney Museum at the southern end of the High-Line, and the Richard Estes show at the Museum of Art and Design on Columbus Circle at 59th street. Riding the subway uptown from Chelsea to Columbus Circle I caught the daylight streaming into the station and was struck by the wild combination of light sources, shadows and dramatic colors. I could tell the sun had just passed the prime point in the sky for the best composition and I marked the time to try and return the next day to shoot reference photographs for future paintings.

On all my trips to the city I visit with old friends, many of whom are painters I've known for decades. I was watching the clock while one of these painter friends and I did our swing together through MOMA, knowing that the broken cloud cover was going to make my chances of catching the light at the station just right pretty iffy. When it seemed like it was time to walk from MOMA on 53rd near 5th avenue over to Columbus circle and give it a try, I said my goodbyes and headed that way.

As I entered the station the sun went behind a cloud, but I wandered around framing the shot I wanted and hoping I was going to get a chance to catch the right combination of sunlight, interesting people on the platform and maybe even a train. Each time the sun would burst forth the intensity of the light was momentarily blinding and it was almost like turning a mood control up, watching the smiles on peoples faces, only to see them turn to involuntary frowns as another cloud blocked the rays. As each train would enter the station, the platform would empty, and my wait for the crowd to build would begin again. Eventually everything came together and the couple in the foreground went through a variety of poses as an express roared through on the center track and when the local train they were waiting for arrived, they shot me a glance as they boarded. I always wonder if the people who populate my paintings will ever chance across them and remember when they saw me photographing them...

After returning to my Portland Studio and I was back to working on my Dollar Slice painting I kept thinking about that light in the station, so I took a short break from the weeks remaining of working up the details on it to knock out this little one. The many paintings this size I've done over the last few years are a satisfying way to bring images to life relatively quickly, and they pack plenty of punch despite their small scale.

For those of you who will be in the Portland, Oregon area in June, I have 30 paintings up at a large shared workspace in the Pearl District, and I will also have a private exhibit and June 4th first Thursday reception at a well known archtectural firm in the same neighborhood. Please contact me directly for information about these exhibits or an invitation to the reception. My work can also be seen at the following galleries:

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I'll admit it, I'm no gourmet. I know the questionable ingredients, sub-optimal storage and preparation conditions added to the hectic surroundings don't make a foodie paradise for the knowledgeable, but street (and storefront) food is one of my favorite ways to get to know a place. It's hard to believe that at this late date there are still a fair number of spots in Manhattan where you can get a big made-from-scratch slice of perfect thin crust cheese pizza for a dollar. This one is on 23rd street near 7th avenue and always has a hot just-out-of-the-oven pie being sliced into disappearance and handed over the counter on paper plates to the line of waiting customers, no matter what time of day or night.

I've been looking at the best angles to capture this scene for a few years and had decided on the right time and angle on a trip to the city last November. Doing my normal race around circuit in and out of the city must have taken its toll on my already shot knees, resulting in a complete blowout of my left one and a near total loss of mobility at one point. I had to buy a cane and learn how to use it properly (it takes practice) just to get back to the apartment. Fortunately, after a little rest and some meds I was back in action carrying my stepladder down the street to shoot reference photos around 10PM on the only dry night of that week. As usual in New York, almost no one even looked at me perched on my ladder on the sidewalk. The shots were used to create a composite photograph that had all the characters, composition and dynamic feel I was looking for in one image.

I've always loved the light spilling out from the interior of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" and our view into the tableau at the counter from the darkness of the street. Dollar Slice captures a lot busier scene, but it's my tribute to that point of view and dramatic lighting. My paintings all begin with a complete rough underpainting to establish the drawing, colors and values. Then I work over the entire painting bringing up the details, surface quality and blending that make oils my medium of choice.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

This painting combines the busy 6 train platform on 14th street in Manhattan with one of the hillside streams that runs in the wooded canyons surrounding my homestead only a few miles from downtown Portland. It's a reminder that many of our modern transportation corridors and buildings followed former watercourses and other natural creases in the topography. In fact, Miller Creek is still shown on many surveys, platt maps and records as "Water Road" leading to planned subdivisions that fortunately never came to be, at least here...instead, it remained a rarely seen stream in an undeveloped part of Forest Park where native fish have now returned.

The former massive fill and small culvert under the highway where this stretch is located was replaced with a high bridge a few years ago, daylightling the fish run for the first time in many decades. The electric inter-urban railroad that spanned the creek about a hundred feet upstream of this spot in the early 1900's is now long gone, but the even older freight (and former passenger) spur line crosses it on a low trestle just downstream of the road bridge and still carries trains loaded with oil, logs and wood products daily.

Rising sea levels, record setting extreme weather, a global shifting of habitats and water resources...we are forced to acknowledge and adjust. The dramatic images are everywhere. Flooded subways and neighborhoods after "superstorm" Sandy, the last few winters' mountains of snow and frigid temperatures in the northeast US, and the searing droughts and wildfires elsewhere while the polar ice caps calve sub-continent sized chunks. These are unsettling and disruptive indicators of the consequences of our ant-hill of activities and the unrelenting march of geophysical time. Few of us are willing to pay the price now of making major changes to our lifestyles and routines that might slow or delay catastrophe, but we or our descendants will almost certainly pay later.

If you're in the Portland area, I've recently hung over 25 paintings in a great new shared workspace facility in the Pearl District located in a large historic building. Please contact me directly for location and access information or stay tuned for an opening annoucement in April.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

This painting is another in my series of "Subway Surrealism" images that keep surfacing from the constant accumulation and viewing of my experiences through the lens of art history. Seeing great paintings firsthand in the museums of New York was a key and early influence on the development of my perspectives of the world at large. Getting next to the actual paintings remains one of my favorite ways to see through the eyes and minds of others who wrestle with the simple tools of painting to try and make sense of the tumult around us.

The work of Rene Magritte remains one of my inspirations, and his painting Time Transfixed has always triggered a mysterious thrill for me. Sea Train is my homage to the unsettling juxtapositions and inexplicable re-purposing that surrealism makes such deft use of at its best...

If you find yourself in the NYC subway in the next two weeks, a great mobile app based curated exhibit of subway art is up that features my paintings. Download the free app on your mobile device, point it at the horizontal format print advertisements in the stations (not in the cars) and many of them will be transformed into work by a group of artists curated by Jowy Romano of the Subway Art Blog No Ad / Unlimited Ride

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

This multi-layered West Village wall caught my eye on one of my NYC walks a few years ago because it was a kind of historical map of the building's occupancies. The reflections in the blue glass of the modern cars parked on both sides of the street were disrupted by the missing panel, and the revealed window beneath looked into the dim past. It also served to obscure most of my reflection as I shot the reference photos. The adjacent storefront on the right is also the result of several different surface treatments over time to "update" it, and like the brick building on the left, the upper stories retained a much earlier appearance.

This is another kind of "above and below" like that of the juxtaposition of surface life and the subways below ground that fascinates me as an illustration of the accumulation of human endeavors over the years, decades and centuries. I was equally attracted to the depth of layers visible inside the building on the right, where behind the reflections in the front window were interior rooms and walls and in the distance, a glimpse out the back door and across the next street over.

For those of you in the NYC & Connecticut areas, my work is included in a group show running through October 31st at Project 3W57 in Manhattan

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

I have a hard time truly understanding the density of human activity represented by the evidence visible when flying over landscape. While ports, large industrial installations, mines and extraction fields are all impressive, the view of a city like New York can be overwhelming.

As I painted the Big Picture I was mesmerized by the turbulent and intricate maze of life each tiny flick of the brush covered...even deep underground. The vast expanses of the west sometimes make me envision how big a city would fit in those views through the windshield, and how transformed that dusty ground would be with subway concession stands, dollar slices of pizza on the canyon-land street corners and millions of people rushing about intent on their glowing screens...

For those of you in the LA area, I'll be speaking at the William Rolland Gallery in Thousand Oaks, CA on October 1st : The Beautiful: Contemporary Images of America

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

The two paintings above are part of a group of five new San Francisco street scenes based on images gathered on my many trips to the Bay. Please click on either one to see the others on my WORK page.

I first went through the area in the summer of 1971 while heading back east to attend RISD after backpacking and hitchhiking on a summer trip through the west. I was on my way to catch a freight train in Portland and enjoyed a week or so admiring the Bay area's unique cities, scenery and topography. More recently I had the privilege of sailing in and out of the Bay on million barrel supertankers while serving as a federal court appointed monitor. Standing on the roof of the pilothouse inbound under the Golden Gate Bridge lit by a full moon as an outbound containership passes close by creates a whole new perspective.

I have friends and relatives scattered around the Bay and the eleven hour drive from my home base in Portland is a frequent choice for a road trip to the relatively exotic variety of fun to be found there. Walking, riding and driving the streets of San Francisco, Oakland, Benicia and Berkeley always adds to my trove of memorable images and experiences. There is something special and well recognized about this part of California that is characterized by its own kind of golden light. The multi-ethnic street life and food choices available at all hours are set against a backdrop of visits to friends at start-up tech firms in the city and at the big shops in the Valley. It all makes my stays in the Tenderloin, Noe Valley and the Oakland hills as interesting and intense as my New York visits. I've got my habits and routines worked out now, which helps with navigation and getting the most out of these trips, so stay tuned for more paintings from them as time goes on...

13 of my paintings are on display in a group show at the William Rolland Gallery in Thousand Oaks, CA (extended through October 2nd) The Beautiful: Contemporary Images of America

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

When I returned to painting full time I was transitioning from a mostly maritime career, first as a shipowner and later as captain of various vessels I used for towing, salvage, launch service and line handling on the working waterfronts of New York City, Charleston, South Carolina and Portland, Oregon. I also manufactured a line of composite deck structures for boats, ships and cranes which kept me in touch with other mariners to get them the pilothouses and control stations they needed for all those long hours at the helm.

I've always enjoyed being near big ships in small boats, and running a launch to and from ships anchored and underway is a challenging task. The currents and relative motions of the vessels, and the unpredictable actions of international crews going on or returning from shore leave can make it difficult, but the sensory rewards are many. The vivid colors and their reflections on the always moving water, smells of foreign cooking, snippets of other languages, and exotic home ports lettered on their hulls make each ship an island nation in the stream.

From my studio in the forested west hills, I can see the lower Vancouver anchorage in the Columbia River near its confluence with the Willamette River, just downstream from Portland. When three or more ships are there I'm tempted to launch one of my kayaks or my outboard skiff and get close for new reference photos. These recent paintings capture some of those occasional visitors.

These new small paintings are about my lifelong fascination with industrial subjects, especially at the nexus of oil & steel. Dick Bellamy's Oil & Steel Gallery at 157 Chambers Street in lower Manhattan (1980-1985) was one of my frequent clients for rigging and transportation of heavy sculpture during the years I provided these services to many artists, museums and galleries, although I was never fortunate enough to join the hallowed ranks of the artists exhibiting work there.

Coalinga 148 is an image from a great detour I took through central California on my way back from delivering 13 paintings to the show north of LA last month. Tank Car is from the rail line near my studio in Portland that has been seeing increasing numbers of long unit trains of Bakken crude from North Dakota in transit to the terminal at Clatskanie, Oregon where it is loaded on vessels for transport down the Columbia River. The rapidly increasing volume of this traffic and the route is cause for concern for many in the communities along the tracks who worry about the potential for catastrophic accidents involving the explosive product.

The above new paintings reference a recent extended trip to NYC in conjunction with my successful solo exhibition there. Six weeks of immersion in that fast paced urban chaos provided a flood of imagery and observations that I worked to capture in video, still photographs and a slew of journal entries to process, consider and catalog.
My return to the clean, green and quiet Pacific Northwest came after flying over the vast American landscape between the coasts in just a few hours. That rapid transit of the entire country while in near continuous view always heightens the significance of travel and residency away from home for me. It demands my reaction in paint.
The NYC show will be followed by a group show curated by Rachel T. Schmid at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, CA. The exhibit runs from May 30th through September 11, 2014 and more than ten of my paintings are included.

Here's a link to the show with more information: the Beautiful: Contemporary Art Featuring America

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

The simultaneous worlds of activity above and below ground, each usually unseen from the other, are connected by the maze of subways and trains that wind through them both. This web of tunnels, bridges and tracks route us over and under each other, and we see each other briefly from one window to another in a passing train, next to or across from us in a car, or waiting on a station platform. We begin our journeys alone and together, flowing from buildings to streets and then through turnstiles that lead to the trains, riding in all our moods, in every season or time of day and night to our next stops. The buzz of our ceaseless activities and the silences in the gaps form the music that accompanies our travels from one part of our lives to another as we watch the changing faces and places.

The images I continue to gather and use as portals into this tracked world are full of color, even in the darkest tunnels, and have mesmerized me since my first glimpses out the front car window of the subway as a child. The paintings on this page and the rest of this series shown on my "work" page are small windows that become much more than individual compositions when viewed in groups of above and below ground views. They become frames in a dynamic cross section of the bustle and tumult of our daily travels.

Solo NYC Exhibit Invitation: For all of you in or near the NYC area who would like a chance to view more than 30 of these paintings as they should be seen, I have an upcoming 8 week show scheduled from March 3rd through April 25th. The exhibition space is located in a Manhattan architecture office in the Flatiron District, open Monday - Friday. There will be a reception Thursday evening, March 6th.
Please email me for an invitiation to the reception or for information on viewing the exhibit.

When I was in my mid teens I wanted to be the next David Smith, and I learned how to cut and weld steel with an oxy-acetylene torch in a rented garage/studio. Eventually my 3D work became assemblage boxes that can be seen in the early 1970's on my SCULPTURE page (scroll down). Gradually I began to make painting my primary medium, partly because the burden of storage and transport of sculpture could be replaced by the relatively lightweight portability of painting. But during the years I rebuilt and lived on an old oil tanker in NY harbor I continued to accumulate a lot of heavy duty tools, equipment and skills that were only added to by my later years as a manufacturer of marine deck structures for tugs and ships.

I've always been interested in lattice structures, particularly crane booms and transmission line towers, assembled from small steel angle but capable of carrying heavy loads. Recently I found a nearby trove of industrial debris, including most of the elements that inspired me to assemble this totem to my life on the water and in the woods. The process of singlehandedly fabricating parts and doing the rigging and hoisting with my 1956 vintage crawler crane and slightly newer mini-excavator (sometimes in tandem) was an enjoyable challenge.

Here are some photos of the process:

Another recent 3D sidebar to my painting was last years's readymade sculpture of inverting my 3/4 yard clamshell bucket and pinning it to a buried steel frame:

But new paintings are still the main program, and here are two new ones:

My latest large painting is part of an ongoing series of oils and a watercolor I began in 1979 about this dislocation. Living in and working in Portland while visualizing elements and realities of NYC's intensity has always given me a curiously perverse thrill, a kind of best of both worlds. Although I spent my formative years in and around New York, I also felt inexplicably drawn to the west from my earliest memories and prefer it as a base of operations ...with my forays into the grit, density and overloads of the city taken in measured doses for added stimulation as necessary.

The background here is just off state route 14 near Dallesport, Washington overlooking the Columbia River. I was able to drive up a gravel road and climb over the barbed wire fence to wander through the rocky rangeland so I could get just the right point of view and and sun angle to match my library of subway entrance reference photos.

The oldest visual reference I can find to this subject is the opening scene in Buster Keaton's 1922 classic film "The Frozen North":

Here are two interesting links to artist Martin Kippenberger's Metro-Net project I recently learned about of installations he began in 1993 of full size replica subway stops in various cities worldwide. It appears other artists are also picking up where he left off:

Kippenberger
Scheruebel

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram

Thanks to all of you who have attended my exhibitions, visited this website, or I've met in my long series of adventures. Many have asked for an easy way to be added to my email list so they can see new work and hear about upcoming exhibitions in a timely manner, so I've added a "subscribe" button at the bottom of these pages. I always update this website as soon as paintings are done by adding them in chronological order on my WORK page.

The small oil painting on panel above is the third in a new series I've been working on about NYC food carts at night. Although I was pretty whipped from long days in the hectic city, I headed out with my stepladder (for a better point of view) on the subways and streets until way past midnight during a hot week this June. This scene and the one below were some of many that made it worth the effort. After capturing the activity in the painting below, I walked from there to the jammed-to-the-walls throng and general madness in the blocks around Times Square, where even heavily armed security forces ignored me while I was perched on a ladder on the sidewalk, or after climbing on a trash bin when I couldn't deploy the ladder: photographing, waiting and photographing to capture as many people and their interactions as I could for reference when I'm three thousand miles away in Portland trying to paint about it.