Alum’s paintings mark new approach to landscape and ecologies ‘on the brink’

Brackish Water, the exhibition of watercolors currently on display in the Croll Family Entrance Hall of Yale Divinity School, was born following a sleepless night and a life-threatening illness. For artist Jon Seals ’15 M.A.R., the paintings represent the culmination of explorations he’d begun more than a decade ago as a graduate student at YDS and the Institute of Sacred Music, and mark the transition into a new understanding of what it means to paint the living world.

The show features a dozen circular “landscapes” depicting watery views of aquatic vegetation. In an accompanying statement, Seals writes that the exhibition’s title “marks the collision of saltwater and freshwater, where currents clash, boundaries dissolve, and a precarious new chemistry emerges.” The compositions, he explains, are “built from materials gathered in ecologically imperiled sites,” to highlight places “on the brink—coastlines eroding, wetlands vanishing, waters turning toxic—and [ask] what it means to dwell amid such urgent fracture.”

The artworks, all painted in the past two years, are meant to “confront the accelerating environmental crisis while inviting spiritual reflection.”

The exhibit is the latest of a lengthening list of exhibitions by the artist at YDS. Since 2014, when he curated the four-person show Transitions outside the Great Hall, Seals has organized or exhibited in a total of eight exhibits at the divinity school or ISM’s Miller Hall. Brackish Water is his first solo exhibition at the school.

Seals’ new paintings possess a lyric beauty built from a compressed palette of greens, blue-greens, ochers, and duns, and his fluent brushwork of washes, flicks, smudges, and graceful, almost tender, lines. The plants, reeds, grasses, fronds, and algae that fill the frames, all seemingly weightless in the water they inhabit, appear at once literal and impressionistic, as tangible as weeds clogging a propeller and as ethereal as swimming through a dream. This floating sensation is heightened by Seal’s play of light across the paintings, in reflections, refractions, shimmers, shadows, and scraps of sky.    

The images are also marked by the artist’s distinctive practice in creating them. Like many landscape painters, Seals often works outdoors, setting up his easel beside the scene he wants to depict. This is typically in one of the two regions he calls home, Florida’s Gulf Coast near Tampa Bay, where his wife Kristin grew up, or the Kankakee River Basin in northern Illinois, where since 2018 Seals has been Professor of Art at Olivet Nazarene University, a Christian university an hour south of Chicago. 

These settings are more than simple locales for his paintings; they are an integral part of their material makeup. “My practice is inseparable from place,” Seals notes. He incorporates soil, sand, vegetation, and water from the physical sites into his pigments and liquid medium. The practice is at once a way to express the artist’s connection to the land and a form of “surrendering to the materials’ own stories.”

“These substances are not symbols,” Seals writes in his statement, “they are witnesses. I pour, dip, and layer paint with site water, letting the earth speak through every stain and tideline. The resulting surfaces hold tension: salt meets fresh, wild meets manipulated, sacred meets profane.”

The paintings are made on traditional rectangular sheets of heavy paper, then cropped into roundels before framing. The circular shape radically changes the way we look at the final works. Without the markers of traditional landscape—land and sky, foreground and background, receding perspective—the paintings possess an ambiguity of both scale and context. They shift effortlessly from landscape to still life, life study to abstraction, looking now like the view from a glass-bottom boat, then of organisms on a microscope slide or the heavens through a telescope.     

Seals first experimented with the circular format during a fateful night in early January of last year. As insomnia interrupted his sleep, the artist spent the time thinking about how he could disrupt the conventions of the standard landscape. 

“I’d been wrestling with the horizon line of the rectangle,” he told me. In the predawn hours of the new day, he hit on the idea of the circle, even going so far as trimming some of his existing works into rounds and texting the results to friends.

As the sun came up, Seals was restless and left the house to run some errands. Driving back home, he began to feel dizzy, and by the time he’d arrived home his head was swimming. He was overtaken by an epileptic-type seizure and rushed to the hospital, where he was placed on a breathing machine and put into a medically induced coma to break the cycle of overactive brain impulses, convulsions, and sensory overload.

“I barely got the car parked,” he recalls, “stumbled through door of our condo, and then became incredibly dizzy. The next thing I know I’m in the hospital and the doctor is asking me if I know what year it is.” 

Doctors have found no obvious cause for the condition, called “status epilepticus,” and it has not recurred. The prescription was lifestyle changes—less coffee, more sleep, regular exercise— and a preventive medication he is now weaning himself from. 

“I’m just believing it’s gone away,” he says.

Seals woke from the coma with a vivid image of a “resurrection fern,” a woodland species native from Illinois to Florida, alive within him. As he recalls the vision, he pulls up his shirt sleeve to reveal the same lush, winding fern now tattooed on his left arm from wrist to elbow. He also emerged from his induced sleep with a conviction of how to proceed with his art. By that spring, he’d begun the roundel series that has culminated in Brackish Water.

Seals was back at YDS for several days in September with Kristin and their children, Leo, 12, and Tali, 6. While on campus, he gave a sermon and led a visualized meditation at Marquand Chapel and was a guest speaker in the “Sensational Materialities” seminar taught by Professor Sally Promey ’78 M. Div. Seals spoke at a midday reception for the exhibition attended by some 50 people, introduced by Professor Emerita Teresa Berger. Dean Greg Sterling welcomed those gathered and announced that the Divinity School had purchased the exhibition’s four largest paintings for the newly opened Bauer Hall at the Living Village.

Our conversation began the day of the reception and was continued a couple of weeks later on the telephone. The interview below is an edited excerpt from that second, two-hour interaction.

Timothy Cahill: Until last year, you were painting in a standard rectangular format, the common landscape orientation, wider than it is tall. But all the paintings in this exhibition are circular, which is a major departure. Talk to me about that breakthrough of the circle.

Jon Seals: The rectangle has this implication of a horizon, and with the landscape I’m always wrestling against a certain tradition of the horizon line. The horizon line is so compositionally oppressive. You’re immediately orienting the viewer to what’s up and what’s down. But when you take the horizon out or break it down, then you lose that sense of orientation and open to new possibilities. Now there’s a mystery that your eyes are trying to make sense of—are you looking through something, or above it, or below? 

So, it totally upended the usual sense of context? 

Yes, and that’s pretty exciting. The circle seemed very right. It’s often the way we view the world, our eyes are round after all. We’re looking through a magnifying glass if we want to go micro, and if we want to go to the cosmos, we’re looking through a telescope. There’s that in-and-out, big-and-small thing. And many of us wear glasses or contact lenses.  So, the circle becomes a way to reference the lens that we look at life through without being too obvious. And spiritually, there are so many wonderful ways you can think about the circle—as a circle of life, a circle of the seasons, the commitment of a wedding ring. I have my wedding band tattooed on my finger.

How do you connect these paintings to your environmentalism?

In terms of stewardship and theological significance, taking care of the planet is critical and our earliest mandate. It is an honor and service to God and neighbor in the most expansive terms. Everything’s a circle. What you put out there comes back around. What we do can have negative consequences or positive consequences, not just for ourselves but for our children and their children. It’s a loop, a boomerang. The whole springboard for me was with my son Leo. When he was 4 or 5, we took him to this beach in St. Petersburg, and when we brought him down to the water, people warned us to pull him out because it was toxic with sewage. Kristin and I had been on that beach many times, but that was years ago, and now you couldn’t go into the water. That was a trigger for me. It made it personal. 

Your practice of incorporating elements of the land into the paintings began a decade ago. At first it was coal dust and tobacco from your home state of Kentucky. 

Exactly. Yes. 

Then, the idea wasn’t related to any kind of environmental awareness, but more as an expression your own and your family’s identity.

It was. This was after I’d taken classes with Sally Promey on materiality and started looking at how artists use materials not just as supply, but for the stories the materials themselves have to tell. That got me thinking about addressing my own personal history. What are the materials that define my family? It was coal and tobacco.

You’ve described these interactions with materials as “sensory encounters” and suggested they can lead to profound transformational change.

Yes. In my son’s case, it was this encounter with sewer toxins in the water and what they could do to his health. That physical encounter became transformative for my art practice, because now I’m making art about that place with those materials.

In each case incorporating the water and other materials you find at the sites, even if it’s polluted.

My first attempts were painted with the water just as I collected it. The paintings looked great when I made them, but two weeks later they were covered in mold. I learned that if the water has living microorganisms in it, including sewage, I have to boil it before I work with it. Otherwise, mold will destroy the painting. 

You’re boiling the water, but you’re not distilling it. That takes away the organisms that feed mold, but you’re not eliminating other organic materials, like hydrocarbons, or inorganic chemicals, heavy metals, minerals, whatever other kinds of pollution may be present. Boiling doesn’t make any of that disappear. 

That’s right. I just want to get it to a state where I can paint with it in an archival way. In the Promey seminar, one of the students observed that the paintings also archive the places at the moment the water was collected there. It’s embedded into the fibers of the watercolor paper. 

In the past, your art tended much more toward abstraction, but the work at YDS depicts plants, weeds, algae, whatever is in the water that you’re painting, even reflected clouds. What prompted this change to recognizable subject matter in your work? 

Yeah, that’s really hard for me because when subject matter becomes recognizable, it’s nearly impossible to not be clichéd. I’m stepping into this tradition of landscape painting and it’s like, how to deal with that? I wrestle with that question every time I’m painting. When it gets too literal and figurative, I usually pull back, maybe just pour a bunch of water over it. Then, if it gets too crazy and chaotic, too abstract, I bring something back that can ground it. In some of the last paintings I did in this collection, a real saving grace for me became drop shadows. I would throw a subtle drop shadow across the surface, like a shadow formed from a reed or a piece of grass, and all of a sudden there’d be a tension there, between the illusion of depth and the surface. The image could be of deep water, but there’s a shadow playing on top of the water too, and that complicates the space. 

Timothy Cahill ’16 M.A.R. is a writer specializing in religion and the arts.