James Seavey

Member since 2025

Since his early years in Rockport MA, pushing oil paint around at the Rockport Art Association (no '& Museum' in those days) Saturday art classes, James (Jim) Seavey has been a miniaturist, working in hand sized media from metal to photography. He trained as a silversmith and photographer at RISD, and worked in the silver industry for 15 years, including five as proprietor of Halibut Point Pewter, his studio workshop in Gloucester. He and his wife, Rev. Gail, moved far from their Lanesville home as she pastored congregations in other states and here in Salem. Mid life, he followed in his father's boatbuilder footsteps for a year in East Boston. Now retired to downtown Gloucester, he is happy to be finishing up some metal vases made in his Tennessee workshop, hammering up sheets of copper and finding other materials to make into sculptures, puddling watercolors onto paper, and be taking photos of other than puddles in Nashville. He works all his media together in intricate assemblages based on watercolors overlaid with one or more altered photographic images, folding the paper, found objects, medical products waste, which drives him nuts that it can't be recycled.

His main passion these days is photography: "I've been taking photos seriously since high school using my father's home darkroom. The year before I moved into silversmithing at Rhode Island School of Design, I majored in graphic design, including photography, taught under Harry Callahan, one of the greats, in league with Alfred Steiglitz, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Minor White. I learned enough to know my way around a Graflex and a 35mm SLR, and that I hated dark rooms. After years of arty slides for my own use and inspiration, and portfolio shots of my silversmithing (metal requires its own techniques of lighting), I have been liberated by the digital age. Now I use the camera as a way of exploring form and color as I find it, with a goal of producing a pleasing composition of form and color. Often so abstract as to bear meaning as the viewer finds it, the photos are mostly 'as found' in nature."

“I follow the light, seeking a complex arrangement of color and form based in nature, but pulled from it to make a satisfying composition the meaning of which remains open for the viewer.”

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