Sean Huntington

I am obsessed with nature. The texture of lichens on tree bark, the way branches curve and mingle among one another, the repetition of trunks 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 watercolor I 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 edged in metal. Sean Huntington grew up in Derrick City Pennsylvania just outside the Allegheny National Forest. Being surrounded by woodlands in an unpopulated area caused an initial lack of social skills but created an intense interest in the natural world. He maintains a studio in Western New York state where he does his best impression of a big and tall version of Bob Ross .