Seth Birchall
September 2023
Seth Birchall's paintings are meditative worlds in heightened states of colour and life. Birchall's fictive landscapes are compositions of found photographs, sketches and his memories of Australia and Bali. From intimate to large scale, they reflect the biophilic impulse of both painter and viewer alike-the urge to fall away into an arboreal scene, or to drift into water or skyscapes beyond the canvas. Birchall's paintings seem even to reverberate, moving fluidly through a heady colour spectrum. From the contemplative tones of Eucalyptus bordering a body of water to the highly keyed blaze of a sunset, colour appears reflective of both physical and internal states. With a unique palette and brushwork, the artist offers a contemporary riff on the rich art historical traditions of landscape.
From watercolour to oil, Birchall builds into the work his major influences including the atmospheric effects in works by the Australian Tonalist Clarice Beckett, Romantic artist William Blake's electrifying scenes of heaven and earth, 19th century French painting, and Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the 'floating world'. Varied references such as these collide in compositions that seem to shape-shift before the eye, drawing viewers into the depths of a complex interior universe. His works act as portals for looking both inward to psychological states and outward to the natural world.
Text Courtesy of Sullivan & Strumpf Gallery
Seth Birchall
Memory Leaves Trials, Patterns, Edges, Walls, Bottoms and Chasms, 2023
Oil on canvas
153 x 244 cm
Copyright of the artist
Ghost Gums , 2023
Oil on canvas
199 x 163 cm
Copyright of the artist
"When talking to Seth about what it is that he paints, he circled around beginnings and endings, and the journey in between, in cyclic fashion (a stunning response.) Not once did he state the physical stuff like trees, grass and nature, using paint, canvas and brushes. Words like here, there, and now, touching on fear, longing, and ecstasy, leapt at me from him, making it apparent that Seth doesn’t put all of his knowledge and history behind the flat formalities of the literal in life. He lives in finer and more layered detail; examining things in life that are hard to look at: himself, the world, time. I think that's why his paintings look at us without poise, armourless and unmoored–they are precarious yet bold refusals of absolutes, reborn with every new meeting. Does it matter if we’ve been to this painted place before? Not really. Like a moon under water, it's somewhere in us regardless."
*extract from The Moon Under Water, by Emma Finneran
Sullivan+Strumpf Magazine | April/May 2023
Seth Birchall
River South Coast, 2022
Oil on canvas
199 x 183 cm
Copyright of the artist
Seth Birchall
River Composition III, 2022
Oil on canvas
152 x 117 cm
Copyright of the artist
Health, Established and Love, 2023
Oil on canvas
199 x 163 cm
Copyright of the artist
"Trees streaming up branching into life. Trees loosely braided into forested apertures and into each a brushy wave of sky and change gushes like so many rock pools filling. The wooded verge that we so often inhabit in Seth Birchall’s paintings gives way to lyrical stretches of watery inlets crowned by a quivering primal circle of sun or moon issuing a lambency that is swiftly unmoored from its source. On its way to us it gets caught up in a kind of free jazz paint play, scooting around the canvas in careening arcs, rasping at the edges of leaf and limb, unifying everything in a raw commotion of white-hot sulphuric yellow pastels and blue-violet arpeggios."
“Seth's paintings offer this kind of physically and psychically orienting experience, I would suggest both for him and for us. In the words of John Clare: Health and pleasure glistens everywhere. I expect a parallel essay on Seth's paintings could be composed solely from lines of Clare's.
From within the inner space of the forest we inhale the airy sweep of light. The moon is an eye in the sky and its gaze travels the ridges of air to us. Like the childhood moon that followed us as we sat in the backseat or put the rubbish out, the same personal address chimes again and again throughout Seth's oeuvre.“
An eye in the sky
A round hole of moon
Holes made of intersecting branches.
*extract from Changing Space by Nathan Hawkes,
Artist Profile Magazine, issue 59, 2022
The Setting Sun Talks, 2023
Oil on canvas
183 x 153 cm
"These paintings are an orientating experience, not only do the trees in them provide the artist with a formal structure for painterly experimentation, they evoke times spent immersed in a deep and varied signary where happiness arises from the transitory cloudscape or the evanescent relay of bird calls. Times when our cerebral screen-lit world is deferred and things begin to make sensuous sense. We recalibrate to our less frantic, some might say ‘better’ selves.
There is a line of the late dance critic Edwin Denby’s that strikes like an arrow deep into the trunk of a Birchall tree: ‘Art takes what is an accidental pleasure and tries to repeat and prolong it. It organises, diversifies, characterises’ Many of Seth’s paintings have their genesis in a cumulative reservoir of pleasurable times spent in nature and the task of producing a painting is instigated by the subsequent desire to recall, build and convey these pleasures and an essentially ebullient, relaxed atmosphere."
*extract from
These Loquacious Edges by Nathan Hawkes
Sullivan+Strumpf Magazine | April/May 2022