The New York Times offers an obituary of Charles Seliger who was the last link to Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Seliger is also the last of a type of artist who always held a job. In his case, he worked at a china company rising from artist to executive before retiring in his late sixties. Meanwhile, he produced 10 paintings a year and had a regular schedule shows, including one last year:
While fellow artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning created high drama with drips and bravura brushwork on billboard-size canvases, Mr. Seliger conjured up his own private worlds on canvases, and later Masonite boards, that rarely exceeded the dimensions of a cafeteria tray.
Strongly influenced by the Surrealists and the idea of automatism — the belief that the artist’s undirected hand could reach deep into the unconscious — he layered skeins of fine, interlaced lines and overlapping luminous forms that suggested microscopic views of human tissue or plant specimens, land masses seen from an airplane or undiscovered worlds exploding into being.
These poetic explorations, increasingly complex and refined, carried him through a career that lasted more than 60 years.
Charles Seliger, Abstract Expressionist, Dies at 83 (New York Times)
