Artists Statement

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My work is derived from the seemingly disparate disciplines of comic book illustration and abstract mark making. I am equally inspired by city landmarks, pop culture, and non-representational work, often examining, and sometimes blurring, the distinction between so-call high and low art. My continuation of this discussion often manifests conceptually as market campaigns as art as expression. While acknowledging that this philosphical manifesto is often irrelevant to viewers, I concurrently aim to produce aesthetically pleasing decor celebrating the beauty of life. My mixed media digital paintings typically start as impressionistic drawings, hand-drawn abstract doodles, and painted color fields on paper which are combined, transformed, and manipulated in the computer then output onto various substrates.

 

 

Observations of a Viewer (A third party commentary on Blake Makes Art)

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Surrounded in an innerspace art installation by the nuclear mitochondria impressions of life as we don't know it, Blake appears to Make Art from the perspective of Marvel hero Antman, as if we are standing on a glass slide, under a microscope, looking around us at the universe deconstructed. His collective works are a dizzying, brilliant contradiction, for they are far more than the sum of their parts while simultaneously the opposite, the building blocks of a reality we normally never see, but are now allowed a glimpse, a notion, a kaleidoscope dream of, when we step inside not just his gallery, but his mind. This is atomic structure on a hallucinogenic scale. Ease yourself into the alien gene pool that is Blake Makes Art. What you will come away with will be a sliver of the cosmic in each piece that, when one dives into it, will envelop the viewer in an omniverse of psychotropic possibilities. Blake Makes Art is an understatement.

 

 

Bio

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N Blake Seals was born in Huntington, NY, attended the School of Visual Arts in NYC on scholarship, and currently resides in Virginia. Blake has managed a comic book shop, served in the US Navy Reserve as a Corpsman with the Marines, volunteered as a firefighter/paramedic and works in the medical field. He has also owned and managed world-class recording facilities, shown his artwork in New York City, worked on Marvel and Archie comics, and traveled the world as a black belt in Matsubayashi-Ryu Karate-Do. Blake is married and has two sons, three daughters, two granddaughters, and a cat named Mochi.