LewAllen Galleries | 3/22-4/20 | Santa Fe, NM

Visual Texture

LewAllen Galleries presents a survey of available works by the irrepressible adventurer and inspired representational painter Seth Tane

In 2021, Seth Tane sold the earthquake-resistant steel home he had built in Portland, Oregon, and bought a three-story, 300-ton liftboat—once used to service oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico—that was sitting in a shipyard in Louisiana Cajun country. After 14 months getting it ready, he motored Legs III around the tip of Florida and up the East Coast to New York, jacking the boat up on its “three legs” at various places along the Hudson, until landing in his current spot abutted against the busy commuter rail station of Riverside.

This is only the latest adventure for Tane, now 71, in an exciting lifetime of them. The native New Yorker split his time between the City and Portland for many years and, older pieces like Lost Stop from 2013, depicting a subway entrance plopped down in the middle of the Oregon desert, are visual expressions of that duality.

Canal & Broadway, 2012, oil on panel, 48 x 72”

“Because I was going back and forth so much I didn’t really feel as much like a tourist because I was truly cohabiting in both places at the same time,” says Tane. This painting is the answer to Tane asking, “How can I cup my hands and see both at the same time? What would that look like?”

Back in New York, Tane has returned, both literally and artistically, to one of his most enduring sources of inspiration.

“The one thing that really strikes me as unique about this environment and that you don’t really appreciate until you are immersed in it, and have lived in many other places, is how very diverse it is,” Tane says. “Nowhere comes close to New York in terms of visual texture—the wide variety of national origins, skin tones, colors of garments and languages being spoken on any given block. It’s very stimulating for a painter and I’m having a blast.”

Tane is very clear about the fact that he is not, nor does he want to be considered a photorealist painter. “Photorealists are looking to reproduce the effects of the camera—lens flare, distortion—they want you to think it’s a photo,” he explains. “I have no interest in that. [For me, it’s more], how much can you say with how little?”

Lost Stop, 2013, oil on panel, 48 x 72”

Tane is equally clear about what kind of artist he is. “I am a painter of highly representational narrative paintings about the places I travel and see and live in,” he says. “My goal is to share the poignancy and joy of what I see in a language that needs no explanations or translations. No page of wall text is needed. What you see is what you get.

“I’m really looking for that which is unique and powerful, a shared joy and delight in the visual world. If you see something magical and can effectively share that in an accessible way…I want to do that to the best of my ability. It behooves me to spend what limited time I have to create meaningful things.”

Stockton & Clay, S.F., 2011, oil on panel, 47½ x 71¼”

Tane, also an accomplished sculptor, has always been a builder, maker and fixer—to an almost obsessive degree at times—and the industrial themes that run through his work point to another place he finds rich with visual texture. Noting that the success of an abstract painting lies in the “honesty of the marks,” Tane says, “In industrial surfaces—the sides of ships and barges and bridges—those marks, the scrapes and discolorations—are narrative in nature. Where they came from is getting side-swiped by the garbage truck. Each of those marks has meaning and that’s what makes the industrial tableau so exciting.” Tane is amused when people express how difficult it must’ve been to paint all of those rows of bolts or washers and their shadows when he reflects on all the holes he has drilled and nails he’s hammered, and how painting it isn’t anything compared to the laborious task of actually doing it.

“I get a kind of perverse connection from my intimate experience with machinery and industry so painting it, is also celebrating the life I’ve lived.” Featuring a wide selection of older and brand new works, Painted City, his upcoming show at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, opens on March 22 and hangs through April 20, with a reception on March 29, from 5 to 7 p.m. —

LewAllen Galleries 1613 Paseo De Peralta • (505) 988-3250 • www.lewallengalleries.com