By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Some artists seem to be able transfer the way their minds — souls? — work onto paper or canvas. And of those artists, every once in a while, it’s a mind that you’d like to spend more time with.
That’s probably why I stayed so long in the studio of Berkeley painter Judy Seidel recently during the last moments of the last day of the 2014 East Bay Open Studios. I couldn’t get myself to leave those wonderful, life-affirming paintings of hers. Seidel didn’t seem to mind that I was keeping her past her 6 p.m. closing time. She even cheerfully posed for a picture.
A few days later, after poring over the photos I took at her studio, I phoned to ask Seidel what animated her work.
“My life is a lot about healing and transformation — physical, emotional and spiritual,” she says. “You kind of have to fall apart — and let that happen — then come together and reorganize. Breaking apart and coming back together again. Death and rebirth.”
It’s a theme that Seidel has revisited in her paintings over time. It’s not obvious in her work, and she likes it that way. But when you walk into her studio, it’s palpable.
More stories you might like at “Amazing Places — A Walk Around Oakland’s Jingletown,” “Nature. We Love It — But Does It Give a Darn About Us?” and “Actor Robert Morse: Sweaty at 36, Sublime at 83.”
I’m indefinite about the particularities of Seidel’s explanation of what ‘animates’ her work. What kind of breaking down is she speaking of and what are its causes as expressed in her paintings. And when Newhall says that it’s ‘not obvious in her work’, why is it more palpable when one walks into her studio. For I see in the work here buttons and pairs of circles; the ones bearing on fastening things together and the other possibly symbolizing but definitely suggesting infinity, i.e. including all. Thanks for this effort I will think more about the experience and study the paintings further.