Seth Birchall: The Moon Under Water

By Emma Finneran

One time when a friend was using my phone to ‘look something up’ she asked why I had so many windows open. “Because,” I said, “I'm trying to get an impression of something”. We laughed about how locking the phone was equivalent to closing a door and that being busy people, we are constantly closing doors on rooms with multiple windows open. It made me think about how the act of closing the door on opened windows is such a succulent allegory of how we all pretend to be sealed off from the world. Even though there are ways to see in, you can't enter.

Because of that, the door feels like the past to me, while the window feels like the future. It is hopeful, something I am in the process of becoming. Looking out of my window, I’m reminded that some paintings act as windows: illuminated rectangles latent with impressions of life. Monet painted a foggy image of the Le Havre harbour at dawn by looking out of a window. The hurried, loose brushstrokes of the misty atmosphere are all he caught and because of the lack of detail, he referred to the painting as an ‘impression’. Impressions of life are all we really have, aren't they? When I look into a Seth Birchall painting, it feels like I'm looking out of it too. His impressions become mine and mine, his. It is like he is painting windows just for me to open.

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes,” Agnes Varda once said. She saw herself through the sharpest lens. If we are to accept this, we are accepting that we are what we see: what is outside of us is also inside of us. That tree is me, I have roots. That person looks giddy, I am giddy too. When talking to Seth about what it is that he paints, he circled around beginnings and endings, and the journey in between, in cyclic fashion. Not once did he reference the physical: trees, grass and nature or using paint, canvas and brushes. Words like ‘here’, ‘there’ and ‘now’ and musings on fear, longing, and ecstasy leapt at me from him, making it apparent that Seth doesn’t put all of his knowledge and history behind the flat formalities of the literal in life. He lives in finer and more layered detail, examining things in life that are hard to look at: himself, the world, time. That's why his paintings look at us without poise. Armourless and unmoored, they are precarious yet bold refusals of absolutes, reborn with every new meeting. Does it matter if we’ve been to this painted place before? Not really. Like a moon under water, it's somewhere in us regardless.

The atmosphere of life's cycles feels robust in Seth’s paintings, like opening a window only to close a door. A turnstile of pinks licking blues or feelings of dusk by the sea, the layers of colour make me homesick for another world, one that is on its way in tomorrow. Ambient in temperature yet achingly candid, Seth’s yellows and greens feel like questions he’d like to ask the future, whatever that may be. “Is anything ever finished?” he quipped after a terrific silence. It reminded me of that feeling you get when someone, an observer, is taking a picture of you and the gulf that forms between the two experiences. SMILE! All of a sudden, you’re violently supplanted in someone else’s expressionless impression of you, simpering and vacant. Seth's paintings are expressions of his impressions that don't yell at you. Softly spoken and lilac scented, they speak of beginnings and endings as one. They’re not drunk on capturing moments that have been. Instead they turn our attention to moments that could have been, and furthermore, will be. Because of this, the atmosphere of nothing ever finishing in Seth’s paintings fills white-walled spaces with a new hopefulness. Today will be tomorrow soon enough.

In the 15th-century, Italian Renaissance artist Leon Battista Alberti compared the rectangular frame of painting to an open window. He observed that paintings act as a passageway between the artist and the artist's world. The windows Seth paints are in the moments where, through the trees, lit by a stoned moon-sun, the sky meets the sea. That is the portal. The journey down his paths feels like walking on land after too many days at sea. It speaks to a space and profiles a man who isn't afraid of meditating on life's wobbly bits. Bodies of water are bodies as water. When I asked about the relevance of this, Seth answered “Water is erasable!” Drinking it up, washing things off, flooding land or falling off the horizon, the water Seth paints is simpatico with the impressions his life has made on him. Water offers no explanation for us to determine whether it's good or bad. Like life, it's tidal, and at times, makes no sense. Seth paints windows to places that bloom with earthly considerations where our psychic injuries can heal. They are heroless, hospitable and home for the time you’re with them. His colours make you casually crosseyed, yearning for more and undeniably care about you. Like a window is a place for reflection, Seth’s paintings remind me (in that Proust way) that my destination is no longer the place. Rather, it’s just a new way of seeing, and in turn, being.