Kelly Seim Artist

36x36, oil on canvas

Inspired by a steamy summer adventure, driving through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, this painting portrays the spiritual, magical, and mythical heart of the Blues. The Blues were "born under a bad sign" on a plantation, perfected by a mystical encounter with the Devil at "the crossroads," and spread across the country by a flood and migration of Biblical proportions. Saturday nights spent dancing to the Blues, or "Devil's music," contrasted with Sunday mornings at church, singing in a choir. While gospel music uplifted and spoke to the faith and hope needed by ex-slaves, now sharecroppers, to persevere in the face of obstacles, Blues were a salve for and expression of broken hearts, suffering, and longing.

24x24, oil on canvas

Oil on canvas, 40x30

30x40, oil on canvas

PRIVATE COLLECTION

acrylic & gold leaf on canvas, 24x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 36x36

oil on canvas, 36x36

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week. ―Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

oil on canvas, 48x48

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

These words are part of a poem written on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, herself an immigrant woman, who stands watch over America's Eastern harbor. As the current political climate sparked new debate about who can and cannot enter the United States, I saw in my mind's eye the waves of previous generations of women washing ashore from every continent; their diversity, strength, and courage creating the bright and beautiful tapestry which is the foundation of this great country. Any American who is not First Nation has ancestors who were permitted passage through the "golden door" into this country. Who will we be and what will be lost if we close the door?

oil on canvas, 24x30

PRIVATE COLLECTION

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
― Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

oil on canvas, 36x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

The unconscious mind is a repository, a "cauldron" (Freud) of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay. It is dark earth, the ground underneath, full of angels and demons, creepy crawlies, things that bug and pester us through dreams and impulses that we often cannot bear to understand.

oil on canvas, 36x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas 36x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Received Honorable Mention, Springville Museum of Art 2016

In mythology, irises symbolize the connection between Heaven and Earth. This painting is a meditation on how we know and arrive at spiritual truth. The paths are numerous and harmonizing: nature, revelation directly from the Divine, our own intuition and emotions, and stories and knowledge recorded by others both ancient and modern.

24x48, oil on canvas

oil on board, 30x42

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Beauty, Bloom, & Bliss

The Three Graces, celebrated in classical literature and art, were the daughters of Jupiter (or Zeus in Greek mythology), and companions to the Muses. Thalia (youth and beauty) is accompanied by Euphrosyne (mirth), and Aglaia (elegance).

oil on canvas, 30x40

As with any descent to the unconscious, there comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one's nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

oil on canvas, 36x42

I rose from marsh mud
algae, equisetum, willows,
sweet green, noisy
birds and frogs.
― Lorine Niedecker

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air--moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh--felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

oil & gold leaf on canvas, 30x40

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers. -Joe Hill

oil on canvas, 30x40

A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite.

- Elizabeth Fishel

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Having a lover/friend who regards you as a living growing criatura, being, just as much as the tree from the ground, or a ficus in the house, or a rose garden out in the side yard... having a lover and friends who look at you as a true living breathing entity, one that is human but made of very fine and moist and magical things as well... a lover and friends who support the ciatura in you... these are the people you are looking for. They will be the friends of your soul for life. Mindful choosing of friends and lovers, not to mention teachers, is critical to remaining conscious, remaining intuitive, remaining in charge of the fiery light that sees and knows.” 
― Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psychic; its inner nature is just as unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is just as imperfectly reported to us through the data of consciousness as is the external world through the indications of our sensory organs.
― Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

oil & gold leaf on canvas, 24x36

Every habit he's ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom.
― Margaret Atwood

oil on canvas, 30x40

oil on canvas, 30x40

The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.” 
― Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 24x36

The psyches and souls of women also have their own cycles and seasons of doing and solitude, running and staying, being involved and being removed, questing and resting, creating and incubating, being of the world and returning to the soul-place.

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves

24x36, oil on canvas

Hello cowgirl in the sand
Is this place
at your command...
Hello ruby in the dust
Has your band
begun to rust...

- Neil Yoing

Saddled, oil on canvas, 34x36

oil on canvas, 48x36

24x36, oil on canvas

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 36x36

There is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends. -Homer

oil on canvas, 36x48

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Oil on canvas, 48x48

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 30x40

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Oil on canvas, 36x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 48x60

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Oil & gold leaf on canvas, 30x40

oil & gold leaf on canvas, 24x36

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Read me a story,

and tuck me in tight,

say a sweet prayer,

and kiss me goodnight.

oil on canvas, 24x24

oil & gold leaf on canvas, 30x40

48x48, oil on canvas

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Oil and gold leaf on canvas

48x36

This painting bloomed out of lazy time in the South. The heavy air, nights spent drinking and dancing at jazz and blues clubs, and everywhere the thick sweet magnolia blossoms, perched amongst waxy leaves like palm sized clusters of white chocolate shavings. This painting was reworked from a simpler state: turquoise deepened into navy, emerald green into sludge. Then the addition of gold leaf like lightning, or branches catching Southern sunlight between the blossoms.

acrylic on canvas, 48x60

PRIVATE COLLECTION

oil on canvas, 40x30

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Preservation Hall, NOLA

Tuscany, Italy

acrylic on canvas, set of 4, 12x12 each

Wet 'n Wild, Mixtape, Acid Wash, Aquanet

Acrylic on board, 8x10

"Most people would rather be sheep than stand on their own with antlers on."

- Tori Amos

Acrylic on board, 8x10

oil on canvas, 12x12

Acrylic on canvas, 12x12

acylic on board, 11x14

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Acrylic on canvas, 12x12

PRIVATE COLLECTION

Acrylic on canvas, 12x12

PRIVATE COLLECTION

I created this painting to give to a mother I have never met. Through friends, my husband and I found out about a local family in which the father, and now mother, are being deported due to Trump's despicable immigration policies. Both parents have been in the States since their teen years and are hard working, tax paying, social security card holding members of the community. Their daughters were born here and are bright students in the public school system. The father has already been deported, and the mother will be shortly. They are facing hard decisions about leaving their beautiful daughters behind to complete their education, or leave together to start over in a country that none of them know as home. I'm donating this painting, which will be presented to the mother before her impending deportation, as a token of my love for immigrants and as a protest against indefensible, inhumane policies that are not pro-America, not pro-family. This is not normal, this is not sensible, this is not American in the truest, richest sense of the word. Immigrant/immigration is not a dirty word, despite how Trump and his Republican toadies in Congress spit it out of their mouths. Immigrants are beautiful, and we are all immigrants in the United States of America.