Cracks In the Levee: The Paintings of Max Seckel
Max Seckel’s paintings are all about the details. His landscapes come alive with the messy signs of humanity: a traffic cone standing in a puddle surrounded by a weedy yard; a utility pole teetering behind a dumpster; streams of yellow tape banding around trees. His interiors lend a peek into the artist’s mind with an assortment of odds and ends strewn across tables and paintings-inside-paintings that offer layers of stories ready to tell themselves. They are, primarily, imagined environments, but ones that often reflect his own.
Five years ago, Seckel moved to New Orleans. Some of his friends had already relocated to the “The Big Easy” and Seckel had traveled south to visit them a few times. “It seemed like a reasonable place to go, at least for a little while,” he says by phone. “I wasn’t sure how long I would be here or anything like that, but it sort of worked out, so I’m still here.”
Something about the way New Orleans looked made an impact on the artist. “The landscape is totally different from where I grew up on the East Coast,” says Seckel, who was raised in Delaware and lived in Philadelphia for a time after college. He describes the swamps as “an alien form of wilderness” compared to what he knew in his old stomping grounds. The flatness of the terrain, the colorful houses and the big sky all made an impression on him. Plus, he adds, New Orleans looked a bit like the art that he had been making in Philadelphia, where he merged details of urban and suburban environments. “It felt like a good fit,” he explains.
In Seckel’s worlds, skies glow in shades of pink and purple, as vines creep up the sides of walls that stand on waterlogged ground. These scenes take shape on canvas through a mix of media, including acrylic, gouache, latex, and spray paint.
Two years ago, Seckel and friends landed a studio space in a former school building near the St. Claude Bridge. The artist now works out of an old classroom with a wall full of windows. He’s been building stretchers to make canvases for new paintings slated to be a part of a show scheduled at a nearby gallery called The Front.
In front of him, he says, is a painting from a 2018 show, Slow Dreamz, in New Orleans. It’s called “Sunflower” and the single bloom from its title stands tall in
a terracotta pot inside the shell of a building. A mélange of objects are gathered around the sunflower, including two large planks of wood, a tiny garden’s worth of other flowers, oversized dice and a few artworks spread across the ground. Outside this structure are a small turquoise house and a smattering of trees reaching towards the sunset sky, one partially obscuring the full moon.
“Sunflower” was arranged in a fashion similar to a triptych for the Slow Dreamz show. It hung on one side of a painting called “Draw Bridge,” which depicted a waterway view from the perspective of someone peering through the barrier of a bridge. On the other side of “Draw Bridge” was a painting titled “July,” a view from the side yard of a home looking towards a neighborhood where the greenery meets asphalt and trees and utility poles are nearly indistinguishable from each other.
Seckel rarely paints actual locations. He works primarily from memory, creating images that bring together pieces of his life to form fictionalized spaces. Still, Seckel is depicting something that’s globally relatable, as his unkempt nature tangles with the structures humans build—and is often covered with the litter humans create.
In “Searcher,” a cat stands amongst the ruins of a building. “I grew up with cats,” Seckel says, adding that he has “always been really drawn to them as adventurers.” Sometimes, he would watch them through a window. “Often, they just sit out in the sun and do pretty much nothing,” he says. Or sometimes he would catch them chasing bugs. Maybe they would wander away and Seckel would wonder of their whereabouts. Here, the cat seems to have stumbled upon a site weathered by the elements, cluttered with the things that humans leave behind.
Seckel says that he’s drawn to “the ruins of stuff.” Some objects are repeated through various works—like traffic cones, dice, and errant tires. Sometimes they appear slightly off-kilter—those dice might look larger, more pronounced in the scene that you would expect them to be—as if Seckel is trying to break up any illusions that this is the real world.
There’s a particular surrealism to Seckel’s paintings. “It’s more intentionally dream-like, a non-real space, which maybe doesn’t obey all the regular rules,” he says, adding that he’ll sometimes add items that are “super out of bounds or not specifically related” to the scene. Narratives may appear as Seckel builds the images. “Sometimes, the objects are contextually related or in some sort of immediate mini-narrative or something like that,” he explains.
Seckel cites “Windowlessness” as an example of a work with a narrative that developed within it. In this piece, a painting of a landscape hangs on a block wall with a rip through a chunk of pink sky and a small section of a scrawny tree. On the desk below this image is an X-acto knife, perhaps the means by which the cut was made. “There’s this implicit relationship that’s sort of like why the knife is there,” Seckel explains.
There’s this implicit relationship that’s sort of like why the knife is there…”
In “My Little Corner of the World”—its title derived from Yo La Tengo’s cover of the ‘60s love song of the same name—Seckel includes a few real life references, like a painting within the painting of a swamp at night that was inspired by a kayaking excursion. “It got dark when we were out and then coming back, just looking at the stars through the overhanging cypresses and stuff was really pretty,” he says.
In a way, a painting like “My Little Corner of the World” becomes a self-portrait, although, Seckel says, that’s not intentional. “I guess any painting is a self-portrait in its own way,” he surmises. “Maybe some more than others, though.” But, he clarifies, “I’m not trying to express myself as me.” Instead, he says that he’s “mostly thinking about the space on the painting.”
The paintings are pretty much me reacting to stuff immediately, and rarely these self-conscious, broad summaries of a passage of time…”
“Wetlands” is inspired by a real spot where large electrical polls are surrounded by swampy grounds. “You always see birds,” Seckel says. “Birds and trash. That’s the edge of all the swamps around here.” The railroad tracks in New Orleans are similar, he says, noting, “I’ve always appreciated the stuff that you find walking around, the stuff you see.”
In addition to painting, Seckel makes zines using a Risograph printer. He was first introduced to the old school machine with the cult following back in Philadelphia, but it wasn’t until he moved to New Orleans that he became enamored with it. Seckel has two Risographs in his studio. One was procured from a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Alabama for $80. The other came from a church in Alabama. Neither works at 100 percent, so he uses them for different tasks. Seckel likes the aesthetics that come with the Risograph’s process of printing one color at a time. Plus, it’s useful to his practice.
“It takes a lot of the labor out of printing stuff,” says Seckel, adding that it has become a “community resource” as well. In addition to using the Risograph for his own work, he’ll print flyers, posters, and other materials for people as well. “You’ll meet people, interact with the people you live with and all that,” he explains.
Seckel’s latest zine, Pink Tape, contains a mix of cell phone photos taken in the first few months of 2019, as well as recent drawings and photos of paintings that he has produced since late 2018. He tries to make a couple zines or books every year that end up documenting his life at the time. It’s a part of his practice that has some connection to his paintings. “They’re definitely supporting each other in ways,” he says of these two facets of his creative work. “They’re definitely not totally separate, but they’re not co-dependent either.”
One major difference between the projects is their scope. With zines and books, Seckel says, he’s putting together “a survey of a much broader period of time rather than the more focused thoughts that happen in the paintings.” Conversely, “The paintings are pretty much me reacting to stuff immediately, and rarely these self-conscious, broad summaries of a passage of time or something.”
But there’s a correlation between these works in that both rely on the artist’s observation of the mix of nature and human-made objects that fill his world. Seckel captures surroundings so ordinary that they may often be ignored, but he uses those details to fill worlds that straddle real life and imagination.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 52, which is sold out. Get the next print issue with a new subscription to Hi-Fructose here.
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