Setting the Scene for Seen and Unseen

Setting the Scene for Seen and Unseen:

Conversations with Stephen Namara and Tom Seligman

By Jonah Stern

We often feel inclined to ask an artist how they do what they do. It is a question that in some way places the art outside of the artist. How do you, a contained person, produce this, a contained work? But many artists will tell you that their process is far more embodied. Their art is them and they are their art. The evolution and production of an art piece, then, is less a product of technique and more an outgrowth of the artist themself, their quirks, their reservations, their joys, their frustrations; and it begs us to ask instead, what is the artist like? What makes them laugh, what makes them cringe? And what are their thoughts on scarves?

Stephen Namara is reserved but punchy, to-the-point but humorous, and peacefully attuned to the absurdity of life and art (if it is possible to separate between the two). He is selective in his words, his moments, his subjects, his mediums. But that is not to say that he doesn’t often speak. Rather, his mind seems to work with incredible purpose and direction. His art and his demeanor are practices of precise improvisation. He has the ability to operate in distillations – concentrating experience into units of thoughtful simplicity. And while some of it is clearly innate Stephen-ness, he has also worked towards a “brevity and surety of touch.” There is little filler, little negative space, in a conversation with Stephen. “In so many other professions,” Stephen says, “you play a role,” but as an artist, you can be “completely yourself.” He said that in a previous interview he was asked to name three things that motivate him as an artist. “Power, fame, and money,” he responded. Enter, a knowing smile. “I’m joking, of course.” His art, even the portraiture, he would say, doesn’t have “basis in reality”. Instead it has a basis in what he feels, what he absorbs, it contains the spirit with which he imbues it.

The seen and unseen is as much about process as it is about content. He notes that abstract art can sometimes efface the talent, thought, and spirit required to produce it. Yet another reason why Stephen is not either a figurative or an abstract artist. Neither one requires more skill than the other, more vision than the other, more of a purchase on reality than the other. To look at Stephen’s art is to see something that borrows the soft blues and grays from the realm of melancholy and places them somewhere more content, more resolved. His canvases linger like a slowly rotating shard of stained glass, at one moment melting into the background, at another tinting and transforming the world around them. 

Stephen began his educational career in engineering. In his third year of college, he took a drawing class to fulfill a requirement for courses outside of his major. The drawing professor, whose demeanor landed somewhere between presumptuous and prophetic, saw talent in Stephen’s work that perhaps Stephen couldn’t see in himself. He asked Stephen why he was an engineering student. “If I were you, I’d become an artist now,” the professor added. 

When you’re painting a portrait, “they tell you not to stare,” a notion in near total contrast with the nature of the genre itself. “Nobody really knows what they look like.” Rather, Stephen says, we only know what we look like in the mirror. It’s a good, if heavy-handed metaphor. We might see ourselves as the engineer, where others see the artist. We might see abstract geometries where others see trees, or threads, or skyscrapers. Perhaps it’s part of what draws Stephen to portraiture. One of the more concrete assumptions of reality we carry with ourselves is the shape, nature, and affect of our own bodies. But even such perceptions are up for debate. It’s worth being said, however, that Stephen has never done a self-portrait. “I don’t know why. I don’t have a good excuse.” Maybe he understands the pliability of self-image so deeply, he just wouldn’t know what to draw. Seen and Unseen is not about wrong and right, about skill, or lack thereof, it’s about possibility, irony, depth, trickery, and difference. 

If Stephen Namara can be seen as some graceful linear expression of progress, determination, and humor, Tom Seligman appears in neuron-like networks, tendrils branching apart and back together in sprawling tracks of curiosity, profundity, and wryness. Like Stephen, Tom doesn’t identify with any particular art historical tradition. He is not a figurative or abstract artist. He would even insist that he is not an artist at all, but rather a maker. Sometimes, Tom’s art comes to him in a dream-like state. “I have to get up a number of times to pee, you know.” Sleep is not a clearly delineated mind-state for Tom. And in the middle ground between wakefulness and sleep, he might see “a color, a movement, a gesture.” Sometimes that is enough of a starting point from which to make or be made. Sometimes Tom’s art reflects that which frustrated him from his 40 years of museum work. The white gloves, the need to know, and to be in control. And other times still, his creative process is “completely random”. 

Tom says that art viewership reminds him of constellations. “I can see Orion’s belt…but not the rest of him.” Art, for Tom, is like a language where everyone only understands certain words. Yet we feel it all, which is a kind of understanding on its own. Tom is fascinated by language, by scripts. He is knowledgeable in politics and world affairs, yet rarely do his works overtly reference such materialities. “I don’t want to make a representation of death and destruction, all those things that trouble me and hurt us and are chilling in so many ways.” We see enough of it elsewhere. Of course much of art is obliquely political. Tom engages with notions of waste, appropriation, irony, pain. But no matter the content, his work is all but guaranteed to draw out a smile. It will be as playful as it is profound, or introspective, or cutting. Tom says he likes “to blur”. And this doesn’t simply refer to his art. Tom tells us that taking yourself seriously is not the key to being serious, professional. Stephen tells us that being as loyal to the subject in front of you as possible is not the key to realism. 

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this but, I was walking and had some scarf on. Some young guy said, ‘Hey, really nice scarf.’ I said, you want it? He looked at me like I was fucking nuts. And I said no, you take it.” Tom reflects for a moment. “I probably have 100 scarves.” This interaction is maybe less of a testament to Tom’s generosity than to his love of chance. He is a pragmatic fantasist. He dreams because fantasy is necessary to live, because it is necessary to help disentangle yourself from life, and because fantasy and life aren’t so separate. 

Seen and Unseen is not really a theme under which the works of this exhibition were created, but rather a mentality by which Stephen and Tom both live. Tom Seligman and Stephen Namara remind us that reality is as much a construction as any amalgamation of pigments, threads, and gestures they place together for our viewing. Every reality is a product of the seen and unseen, of many things material and ephemeral, of humor and drama. As viewers, we can find joy and pride in what we make of an art piece whether or not it was the intention of the artist. And Tom and Stephen invite us to equally bring this understanding of perspective to life. “Art is life,” Stephen says. “And life is art.”