Edward Seago: 'Seagoland'

"A Rainy Day in Istanbul" by Edward Seago

"The time had come when Seago rarely used 'Capricorn.' He parted with her and in 1958 acquired a studio in Sardinia with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean from his balcony. He had, since 1960, discarded his technique of painting directly from nature, and out of doors he made only color notes and pencil sketches from which to create the finished picture in his studio. Indoors he could portray his personal experience of places or subjects that had once sparked off his imagination and be undisturbed by superficial visual distractions which intruded when he set up his easel outside. Applying this technique, when he was in Sardinia he often painted Norfolk scenes and home in Ludham he worked on the views from his Mediterranean holiday home.

Once on his way to Sardinia, he made a detour to visit Istanbul, where from his bedroom balcony at the Park Hotel, he had an incredible view of the Bosphorous. He made watercolors and pencil sketches there to translate into oil paintings and then went into the streets and filled his sketchbooks [pocket-sized, 4.5" x 7"] with meticulous drawings; street scenes where the houses were correct to the smallest window, a stretch of wall exact to every stone, crowded squares where every person was represented by a tiny pencil stroke. At a time when he had never painted more freely and with such apparent immense facility, his sketchbooks represented a discipline he practiced consistently until the end of his days.

The later sketch books, however, represented exercises in technique rather than memory training because, by that time, the image of ever place or subject he had ever seen and wanted to paint was stored in his mind in complete detail. The wealth of images, he told his friend, the actor Peter Cushing, was stored in 'Seagoland' from where he drew on it at will. His challenge was to express the image on canvas. Sometimes he painted a real landscape from memory; at other times he created a composite imaginary picture which he described as a 'Seagoscape.'"

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Edward Seago: The Other Side of the Canvas" by Jean Goodman.)