Megan J. Seiter, Black Sea, colored pencil, 21 x 14.
Impeccably lifelike yet imbued with an otherworldly mystique through sublime artistry, BLACK SEA, Megan J. Seiter’s colored-pencil portrait of an orchid plant suspended in space, bare roots and all, captured the top prize in this year’s Artistic Excellence competition. Known for her still-life drawings of flowers, fruits, vegetables, and other objects from the natural world, she developed the idea for her award winner in response to the pandemic.
“So much was changing in the world, and we were seeing so many different sides of humanity,” says Seiter, who earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I began thinking how I could show flowers in a different light, just like we’re seeing humanity in a different light.” She settled on her subject because “everybody knows what an orchid is,” yet few people are aware of their tentacle-like tubular roots. After buying a variety of the plants at a local market near her home east of San Francisco Bay, she carefully cleaned the soil from the roots before suspending the plants from fishing line and photographing them for reference.
Her painstaking drawing process, which Seiter estimates totaled about 90 hours, involved meticulously applying as many as 10 layers of pencil to render every detail of the blossoms, leaves, and roots on fine-toothed pastel paper. The surface endows moody depths to the background she created using pastels. Although some viewers may at first think the image is a photograph, “I wouldn’t call it ‘photorealist,’” Seiter says. “I just call my style ‘colored-pencil realism.’”
Find Seiter’s work at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Meyer Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; and www.meganseiter.com.
This story appeared in the December 2022/January 2023 issue of Southwest Art magazine.