Francis V. O'Connor

Herewith the summary paragraph of the author’s Afterword:

Charles Seliger has developed into one of the purest and most methodologically consistent members of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Influenced early on by the Surrealists, he has adopted their “psychic automatism” as both a way of art and of life. Fascinated with the structures of nature, his work is extremely small in scale in contrast to the “mural scale” of most of his fellow Abstract Expressionists. His is a private, not a public, art. Led on by the infinite potentialities of a remarkable series of self-invented techniques, he permits the micro-dynamics of flow patterns, levels of paint application, opacity and transparency, the exquisitely fine interrelations of impasto and wash--and what sometimes appears, to our recently cyberneticized eyes, to be hand-painted digitation--to evoke the forms, colors and vitality of living things without any overt resemblances to biological, botanical--or electronic reality. Indeed, as far as painting is concerned, the eyes of future generations may well see his work as a humanization of the current computer revolution in its understanding of new levels of formal phenomena within those miniaturized interconnections it so deftly exploits, and Seliger so discreetly evokes. Today, there is no painter more adept at letting the facture become the image in fulfilling what Pollock meant by the “experience of our age in terms of painting.” In this Charles Seliger defines the essence of Abstract Expressionism--and maintains its tradition.

Charles Seliger died at 83 on December 1, 2009. Go to Blog at No. 8 for an appreciation of his life's work.