We were lucky to catch up with Dylan Seeman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Dylan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

A bit of both. I started at 26 and now I’m about to be 30. Skill wise to anyone just starting I’m ahead of the curve but for colleagues my age I often feel far behind. A stable income and a developed mature mindset would not hurt pursuing this artistic endeavor, and yet I find myself yearning to have started younger. I can recall kindergarten and a teacher explaining to my parents during a conference that I had advance drawing skills for my age but no one acted on it and it disappeared from life. Although, more likely, I just have a pinch of romantic in me. Who wouldn’t want to crave art from the cradle and steep in a culture that kindled those passions and brought them to startling heights like Beethoven? Nonetheless, I’m equally attracted to the idea of people like Joseph Conrad, living a full career of adventure out on the Seven Seas and slowly building a literature oeuvre of impeccable quality.

In the end, somehow I feel I’m right where I need to be for my creative endeavor, in a state of tension. This tension I need within all aspects of my life, and that gives the eudaimonia to my life’s work. It’s this simultaneous having of a stable and an unstable life, too late and too early, a life of longings and being content that allows me to flourish. It’s cooked into the very fabric of who I am.

Dylan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I guess I’ll start with what I’m about and work into the background. I’m an artist through and through; from the sinew of the muscles to the bones in my body, I am an artist. So far, I feel the center of that role rotates on the idea of trying to bring a concrete image to the inner world problems of the age we live in, as so many artists have done before me. What makes today so unique as “the information age” is just that, more data is available to the everyday person than ever before in history. I think we are deeply wrestling with how to cope in a complex and complicated world.

So how do we take action with immense doubt about our beliefs? Where many heroes are now human. Where my cup of coffee has a price far beyond the few dollars I spend on it. Where the issues of yesterday become a nostalgic yearning for easier issues. Summing up my painting practice; it’s a battle, a discussion, a volley, a dance between juxtaposed ideas of paradoxes. As mentioned in the prior question, tension could equally describe it. It’s old but new, fresh but stale, angry but peaceful, far away and up close, it’s about being at home and on the edge.

Do I have any answers…no, but that’s kinda the point sometimes. By living through an ever evolving body of paintings, my work takes on less a product and more a musical inquiry into life. Art is just one of those funny things; where I’m offering a service that has a product but any one image is not the thing I’m selling.

Like most musician I meet says, “it’s not about the note you played but what’s about to be played in context to the last that makes music.” I want to make painting the way violinist make music. Not a production line fully automated, calibrated and shifts according to market demands. The market bubbles over with picture perfect paintings. Today we have higher quality than Vermeer could ever hope for, but to me many pieces of art feel like the byproduct of industrialized culture and not authentic culture. That’s another aspect of my work. How do we live in a world that can industrialize, commodify, and sell: love, hope, dreams and the rest of human truths? There’s a better way, but I have so much more work to do and I have only just begun.

So why did I get into all this? Honestly, I find it a great deal of fun. After working minimum wages jobs bouncing around landed in the navy for 7 years. One day A buddy was painting a mural on a ship I worked. And I woke up and realized with complete certainty that I was utterly miserable. Decided shortly there after “ya know, I think I’ll try out that art thing, see what its all about” and as I got more involved, questions just kept coming up; what am I doing, why am I doing this thing, what is art, could I do that? None of those questions really stand answered, but to probe and investigate from different angles these ideas have proven to be one of the great joys of my life.

And now my debut series is being shown at On The Edge Gallery in Scottsdale, Az.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I could recommend no one book. Nothing helped, but it was the cumulation of years and years of hundreds of novels, essays, research papers, videos on the subject and practice that impacted me. Nothing is a one stop fix, or a pill that will enlighten your thinking or philosophy—but when somewhere deep inside you, you wake up that thirst for inquire, to want to change your perspective, to desire the intellectual life, then your management skills significantly change, your creative thinking flourishes and a life worth living becomes not easier but more satisfying but it has taken me a lifetime of study and still a lifetime worth of material remaining to study.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

I live for two things as an artist; the warm smile with wonder filled eyes when they see my work for the first time and when someone says, “I never thought of it that way.”

Contact Info:

• Website: www.DylanJamesSeeman.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dylanjamesseeman
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dylan.seeman.98

Image Credits
Paige Pappas