Claire Seidl

Claire Seidl, The Big Picture, oil on canvas, 72" x 65", 2022.

Claire Seidl (born 1951) is an American artist known for her abstract oil paintings, works on paper and black-and-white photography. Critics place her within a lineage of gestural abstraction that extends from early modernism through abstract expressionism to contemporary artists that reintroduced allusions to nature into work that remained non-representational. Seidl's paintings are described as contemplative, searching and wide-ranging in terms of their mark-making, color palettes, surfaces and density, each of which she regulates to produce variations in mood, emotion, light and space. Her photographs are characterized as mysterious, moody and visually challenging due to her method of shooting film at night with low light and long exposures. She has exhibited at those three institutions and at the Baker Museum, McNay Art Museum, Moscow Museum of Modern Art and Noyes Museum. Seidl is a member of American Abstract Artists and lives and works in New York City and Rangeley, Maine.

Education and career Seidl was born in 1951 and grew up in Connecticut. She received a BFA from Syracuse University in 1973 and moved to New York City subsequently, earning an MFA at Hunter College in 1982. She taught painting and drawing at Hunter College from 1985 to 1995 and at Hofstra University from 2003 to 2007. Lesley Heller Gallery, The Painting Center, 1GAP Gallery, and surveys including: "The Art of the 1970s and 1980s" (Aldrich Museum, 1985); "New Currents in Watercolor" (Noyes Museum, 1991); and "Blurring Boundaries: Women of the American Abstract Artists 1936–Present" (South Bend Museum of Art, 2019; Baker Museum, 2021). Critics suggest this gestural range is matched by equally varied color combinations that include allusive and non-allusive hues, delicate pastels, sharp saturations, earth tones and moody monochromes, which regulate the paintings' emotional tone. haunting, and enigmatic. In Artillery, John Haber likened the "strangeness" of the images' intense light sources and brooding, crisp shadows to photograms; Maine Museum of Photographic Arts, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, U.S. Department of State, and Zillman Art Museum at the University of Maine, among others.

She has been a member of American Abstract Artists since 2014.