Sean Huntington

My work is a mixture of my obsessive interest in nature and my inborn need to create art. The texture of lichens on tree bark, the way branches curve and mingle among one another, the repetition of line in a grove of aspen or spruce; these are some of the things that fill my mind and come out in my paintings. The woods are home to me, and in this sense my work is autobiographical.
I work with watercolor, gouache (opaque watercolors) acrylic and graphite on paper stretched over canvas. This allows me to work on a bigger scale without the constraints of traditional framing. The negative tree shapes are created by painting on a latex resist (watercolor masking fluid) or friskit film in the shape of a tree (similar to batik). After successive layers of latex and paint, I scrub away the unprotected paint and then lay in more color and the skies which have a slight iridescent sheen. I then peel back the latex revealing the tree shapes I protected underneath (like removing a stencil). The paintings are then sealed with a UV protective sealant and wrapped in metal.
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