Meet the Artist

If you were to ask James Sebor the name of his favorite surrealist artist, you might expect the name, Salvador Dali, to come up. . But the name Sebor is more likely to mention is that of Andre Breton. And if you're only captivated by the dreamlike content and surrealistic style of Sebor's work, that name might fly over YOUR head. If so, let it fly; don't ask what he painted. Andre Breton was a writer and poet, not a painter. He's also the Frenchman who invented surrealism back in 1924 with the publication of his Surrealist Manifesto. From the time he was a child, James Sebor seemed destined to be an artist. He was born on Vincent van Gogh's 104th birthday in 1957, the son of a conductor on the Long Island Railroad. Like so many of us, Sebor grew up with a third parent - television. (Chuck Jones (Road Runner) and Max Fleischer(Popeye) for example and other influences outside of television; Bill Elder Jack Davis Wally Wood (Mad Magazine) and Frank Zappa(Musician) to name a few). Television is, by its very nature, a surreal world. And to the fertile mind of a naturally creative child, unfettered by adult perceptions, it's a world of not just limitless POSSIBILITIES, but limitless PROBABILITIES. Sebor's surrealistic art reflects this as much as it reflects Breton or Dali. With a BA from Southampton College under his arm and graduate studies at New York's School of Visual Arts under his hat, Sebor left Long Island for the most surrealistic state (and state of mind) on earth - California. There, in Oceanside, he found the closest thing to an artist's "heaven on earth," a studio over a pizza parlor - how surreal. No need for TV anymore, he saw surrealism right from his studio window. Today, he's back living on Long Island, playing the New York gallery game, playing drums in a band with the rather surreal name, the Bed Rockers, and married to a school psychologist. All of which must make for some rather surreal conversation over dinner.

Don't expect to look at James Sebor's "Great Invisibles" series or his sensitive "Millie," a touching tribute to his mother's death in 1999, and hope to understand his work. Surrealism is a method of thought, rather than a great mystery to be unraveled. With time and study, individual works may be unwound, if not unraveled, but if surrealism, with its emphasis on the melding of conscious images with unconscious and subconscious memories, were that simple it would no longer provoke our minds. Sebor plays games with our minds - cat and mouse games - as in his series by the same name. His work ranges from the merely strange (another series title), to the molecular as in his "Molecularism" series. Having seen his molecular "Lunch" you'll never be able to face down a deluxe cheeseburger with fries again.

Being a visual artist, and especially one giving visual form to that which is inherently a literary, intellectual, and speculative genre, one might expect Sebor's surrealistic paintings to be cool and dry. they're not. It's here he departs most notably from Dali. Quite the opposite, it's warm and damp with jungle humidity and human perspiration generated from curiosity, tears, longing, humor, terror, love, hate - all the emotions that are the building blocks of the psyche. Yet the intellectual basis of Surrealism is not ignored. At times in fact, he seems to embrace the logic behind the surreal drawings of M. C. Escher. Sebor's Web site is steeped in Surrealist theory, from Breton's original Great Invisibles to Dali's Critical Paranoia. He walks you through it so that, even though you have no hope in understanding Surrealism, you at least know from whence it came and how it developed.

National Painters List