Inspired by the ancient threshing floor (la era in Spanish) at his home outside Ronda, Seaton’s iterations explore the continual, seasonal play of light and atmosphere across this vast cobblestone circle.
Most works in the series were painted in pure dry pigments on heavy paper, but two paintings, Era V and Era XIX, were painted on linen or canvas. For full details on individual works, contact the artist.
Its traditional dry-stone construction dates back to the Iron Age, but Seaton’s threshing circle probably dates to when his house was a ventorillo, or small roadside inn. Located where ancient roads to Madrid, Seville, Cadíz, and Gibraltar once met, the house has stood on this same spot, in one form or another, for at least 500 years. And its era was once a shared resource for local farmers, who would bring their grain there to be threshed and winnowed.
The Farm Series is a cycle of images inspired by the light and geography of Seaton’s home at La Indiana, a rural neighbourhood outside Ronda. The name of his house, Ventorillo Mariano, refers to its former role as a small roadside inn and, and in one form or another, it has stood on this same spot for at least 500 years.
Seaton developed this series out of a commission from the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda (RMR) to design the official posters for the 2019 Feria de Pedro Romero, the highlight of which is the Corrida Goyesca at the historic Plaza de Toros.
He produced designs for two limited edition posters. Cartel I features a purely abstract arrangement combining poured and spattered pigment, collage and cut-out lettering, while Cartel II includes a more figurative collage of a toro (bull’s head).
The series includes the two original poster designs: Goyesca XXI and Original Toro, and several iterations combining collage and Seaton’s distinctive poured-pigment technique For full details and availability of any work in the Goyesca series, contact the artist.
Seaton’s original designs are now in the collection of the Museo de Tauromachia at the RMR - alongside works by Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Fernando Botero and Francesco Clemente, and internationally known Spanish artists including Eduardo Arroyo, Miquel Barceló, Miguel Ángel Campano, Pérez Villalta, Félix de Cárdenas, Eduardo Úrculo, Abraham Lacalle, Darío Villalba and Josep Guinovart.
This series followed a 2016 trip to Morocco, where Seaton was particularly inspired by Marrakech’s medina, souks and spectacular foothill setting, and by the harbour life of Essaouira.
“In Marrakech everything and everyone seems framed by rose and ochre. It’s the city’s red sandstone walls and buildings, of course, but it’s also the effect of the Moroccan sky, ‘the blue depths above’, as Paul Bowles wrote.”
“Then there’s the almost unreal backdrop of the High Atlas, some of the oldest geology on the planet. Some peaks are snowcapped almost year round, and depending upon the light the mountains seem to hug the cities, or loom over them.”
On the coast at Essaouira, Seaton was fascinated by the traditional fishing boats in the town’s ancient harbour. “[Essaouira] seemed the complete opposite of Marrakech because here, everything was blue and white: the sky, the sea, the stucco houses, and especially the boats.
“In fact, everything wooden was painted blue and it’s a very distinctive blue, a kind of accretion of indigo, ultramarine, cobalt, smalt, all the way to cerulean and even Majorelle. You can almost read Essaouira’s history in this one colour.“
Recently, Seaton traveled to Peru and toured Pachacamac near the Pacific coast, southeast of Lima. This ancient sanctuary was built more than 1,000 years before the Inca empire, and its chief structure La Huaca del Sol (Temple of the Sun), the remains of a vast brick and adobe pyramid, inspired much of this series.
He reimagined the Temple’s patterned brickwork and the intense play of light across its stepped surfaces as geometric variations, which, in each work radiate across the paper in high-key arrangements of cadmium yellows and oranges, often counterpointed by cerulean blue and pale viridian green.
Other paintings were inspired by Huaca Pucllana, the great adobe and clay pyramid in Lima’s Miraflores district, and by artefacts in the Museo Larco and the Museo Nacional de Arqueología, particularly the duality, geometric abstraction and sophisticated techniques found variously in Moche and Lima pottery, and Wari textiles.
This series of bold, diamond-oriented paintings emerged from Seaton’s 2016 residency sponsored by the Fundación Valaparíso. “I worked alongside another Spanish painter, a poet and a Polish sculptor, and the landscape was a constant source”, he recalled.
Started in 1990 by Paul and Beatrice Beckett, Danish hispanophiles and artists’ patrons, the foundation is housed in a beautifully converted olive mill near the village of Mojácar in Almería Province.
“It’s primarily a desert region and the mill is set directly under Mojácar la Vieja, what was once a Moorish settlement. The clear, arid light seemed to constantly reform this strange, pyramid-like hill, repainting it from dawn to dusk. It soon became my core inspiration. I hardly needed any other.”
The colours, plants, and play of form and negative space in the lushly modernist Jardin Majorelle inspired the boldly apposite harmonies in Seaton’s Majorelle paintings.
Cultivated in the 1930-40s by the French painter Jacques Majorelle as the setting for his home, an art-deco-Islamic villa designed by Paul Sinoir, the house and gardens were later restored and expanded by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.
A keen botanist, Majorelle travelled the world to find the widest possible variety of desert-hardy plants for his garden, which includes rare specimens of cacti, palm trees, bamboo, agaves, water lilies and other flowering plants.
As the gardens grew, Majorelle enhanced certain key colour sequences, the most distinctive being the play of green against blue. Lying closely on the spectrum these colours tend to clash or cancel each other out. But Majorelle’s signature blue - an intense, ultramarine - enhances tones from lime to olive to Verdigris, an effect heightened by complementary notes including bright yellow pots, terracotta columns, and winding red-ochre pathways.
These intensely coloured landscapes developed when Seaton sensed a correspondence between the rhythmic patterns in plough lines and the “music of chance” in his poured-paint technique.
“Living and working in rural Andalusia I’m surrounded by southern Mediterranean soil, light, colour, by stark contrasts and forms” he explains.
“And music has always been an important creative parallel, because I’m a clarinetist and have played improvisational jazz for many years, so I’m familiar with layered musical structures.
“Sometimes I can see similar arrangements in farmland. Depending on the light and season, the turned soil meets the sky in so many ways - rising, falling, soft, slow, fast, etc. Which makes sense, of course. There are rhythms within colours just as there are in how you actually paint, right? You see that sort of resonance all the time in Rothko, for example.
“Deep down, I’m still a sculptor, so this is how I look at the world, and it’s undoubtedly how I approach painting. I use pure pigments mixed with PVA, because not only does this allow me a full-colour range from sheer to opaque, but I can build form by pouring colour layer by layer, and this really appeals to me.”
