Seth Ellison
Seth Ellison was born in Beckley, West Virginia in 1984. His childhood was spent compulsively drawing Disney cartoons in preparation for his future career as an animator. It wasn’t until encountering the Louvre Museum in France and a magazine depicting the work of Philip Guston that he decided to become a fine artist. Seth graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009 with a BFA and then from the University of the Arts in 2012 with a MFA. He currently lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife and two children.
Growing up in West Virginia, its beautiful and isolating landscape instilled my mind with a lingering nostalgia. One can easily lose a sense of time and place, getting lost forever in its sweet and kitschy countryside, while at the same time desperately yearning to transcend it. In a sense, it is a place that had been left behind and living on the margin of history—a position which left me with a sharp awareness of my own identity and its connection to it. When I express my own experiences, its struggles, contradictions and cultural aesthetics are always in the background of my mind.
The echoes of the nostalgic and bucolic, of art traditions past, reverberate throughout my work. My appropriative process leads me to draw from many diverse places, such as the 18th and 19th European masters of agrarian landscapes, as well as the comics and memorabilia that saturated America in the early and mid-20th century. I then weave my own contemporary autobiographical experiences into these references to create something both very personal and universal, but always with the unique perspective born out of the southern United States.
