Local artist W.L. Seaton will present the show Cathedrals of Fire from March 26-29 at St. George Church in Maple Ridge.
The opening talk will start at 7 p.m. on March 26, and the show will remain open to the public from March 27-29 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., with the artist in attendance. St. George is at 23500 Dewdney Trunk Rd.
Winston Seaton, 84, said the show is about historic cathedrals that have caught fire, including St. Paul's in London, and Notre Dame in Paris.
Seaton is a career artist, and his first solo exhibition took place in Sydney, Nova Scotia in 1964. In the 1970s, he co-founded the Harmony Lake Group of Painters in Nova Scotia. Like Canada's iconic Group of Seven, they produced landscape sketches around the lakes and nearby parks for more than 15 years.
Seaton explained he developed a style during this period that he continued for many years. It is characterized by broad brush strokes, and an intense palette. He said it is easy to see the influence of early Canadian landscape painters in his work from that time.
The artist has experimented in a variety of media over the decades, including oil, watercolour and drywall mud relief, and his work is primarily architecture and portraits.
He moved to the West Coast in 1980, and continued to paint. In 2000 he retired and returned to Nova Scotia, and to painting landscapes in traditional oil, then moving to a new medium. His encaustic painting saw Seaton mix oil paint with bees wax in an electric frying pan, and the encaustic works were based on historical religious subjects.
From 2008 to 2012, his painting used industrial media including caulking, drywall paste and commercial paints painted on old blackboards.
Now back in B.C. In early 2024, Seaton has ventured into carving with soapstone, with oil painting backdrops.
