bio. statement. cv.

b. 1993. chicago, il.
— lives/works outside chicago, il.

Colt Seager (b. 1993) is an American painter who works in the lineage of postwar American abstraction—the color field and lyrical abstraction traditions of Rothko, Still, and Motherwell, extended through the recent example of painters like Sean Scully and Suzan Frecon.

Based near Chicago, Seager builds his compositions through accumulation: successive layers of pigment and form settle onto the surface, each one partially veiling the last, so the final work records the history of its own making without ever fully exposing it. Central to the work is the Celtic idea of the thin place—a site where the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred grows porous—located here in the Midwest prairie horizon, a landscape defined not by incident but by constant, gradual change: light, weather, and seasonal color shifting over a fixed line.

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My paintings settle, the way sediment does.

I work in layers—successive passes of oil paint laid down over days or weeks, each one partially veiling what came before. What looks like depth or atmosphere in a finished piece is really accumulation: color and gesture buried beneath the surface the viewer sees, still present, still doing work, even though only the uppermost layer is ever visible. A painting, for me, is a record of everything it took to get there—sediment rather than excavation.

I'm working within a lineage of postwar American abstraction that has always mattered to me—Rothko, Still, Motherwell—and in conversation with painters working now, like Sean Scully and Suzan Frecon, who treat color and layered surface as their own subject. What draws me to that lineage isn't a style so much as a shared instinct: that a painting can hold something wordless, and that slowness and repetition are how you get there.

Central to the work is the Celtic idea of a thin place—a location where the boundary between the ordinary and the sacred grows porous. I don't locate that threshold in a single event or image. I find it in the Midwest prairie horizon I grew up looking at—wildflowers and grasses shifting color through a season, rivers and tree lines cutting the flatness, sky and cloud cover changing by the hour. Nothing about that landscape is empty; it's in constant, quiet motion, and almost none of that motion is dramatic enough to call an event. My paintings aren't pictures of that horizon. They're built the way it works—layer accumulating on layer, change happening gradually and continuously rather than through incident—so that the horizon becomes a formal problem as much as a place.

The paintings ask for the same patience they were made with. They don't resolve quickly. What's underneath stays underneath, but it's never gone.

exhibitions

2023 off-grid. belhaus, phoenix.
2023 trio. mont art house, houston.

2022 through time and spirit. alma art, chicago.
2022 in good faith. rhett baruch gallery, los angeles.

2021 a curated selection of paintings. stahl + band, los angeles.
2021 dawn to dusk. hugomento, san francisco.

2020 quadrilaterals. sunday-s gallery, copenhagen. virtual show.

for full cv.