Intercontinental expression – Basil Seymour-Davies | Portrait of an Artist

[Author's Note: I've known Basil Seymour-Davies as a friend for about two years. I chose to write the first 'Portrait of an Artist' piece about him because I think his work is worthy of attention, independent of our friendship.]

Basil Seymour-Davies in his studio at the Fayetteville Underground.

By Christopher Spencer
Ozarks Unbound

FAYETTEVILLE – Basil Seymour-Davies was born within earshot of a revolution.

Khmer Rouge revolutionaries attacked the capitol city of Phnom Penh the day he was born. Bombs erupted outside the Cambodian hospital.

Within three years of his birth, those revolutionaries took control of the country. Cambodia shook off European colonialism and embraced communism with bloody fervor. Intellectuals and artists were exterminated as the new government reset the year to zero.

His father, an Englishman, used their British passports to move the family before the so-called “Killing Fields” were created. They first relocated in Laos and then, as communism spread, they moved to Thailand.

The family found some solace in Thailand. Seymour-Davies said he remembers well the peaceful home they shared in the bustling city of Bangkok. He was a quiet and introspective child who liked to spend time with his imagination. Occasional trips were made to England to visit family.

But when Seymour-Davies was six-years-old, his father died in a car accident.

His Cambodian mother went back to work. She found employment with the children’s charity World Vision because of the many languages she spoke, among them Vietnamese, Chinese and Laotian.

A few years later, she met another man to whom she is still married. She decided to follow him to a new job assignment in the United States.

At 11, Seymour-Davies arrived at Ft. Smith airport to begin a new life. He remembers the move from Asia to Arkansas as a succession of progressively smaller airplanes.

“When we got there, it was sweltering hot in the summer,” he said. “I thought, ‘Where the hell are we?’ I felt like we’d gone from a jumbo jet to a donkey-drawn cart.”

THE ARTIST UNDERGROUND

“So that was kind of the environment I was brought up in,” said Seymour-Davies as he sat in his studio at the Fayetteville Underground recently. The studio and 14 others like it are located in a former bank building beneath the streets of the city’s square.

He moved earlier this year to have more room for his painting. He’d outgrown the spare room in his house. Several of his pieces have sold, even one to a corporation – a mark of rising artistic stature.

His work is psychological and symbolic. The subject matter is almost always a person and he often tells their story visually in a way that anchors to the universal. The bold type facing and imagery, elements of propaganda and billboards, can be seen in some of his pictures. Their usage is subversive not commercial.

Seymour-Davies always loved art – a junior high art teacher gave him some of his first artistic encouragement -  but it wasn’t until he got his fine arts degree in 2006 that he really thought he could make a career of it.

For a decade prior, he pursued other interests, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in psychology and French with a minor in business in 1996.

He worked for Alltel Wireless for the first four or five years after graduating from college, thinking it would be a good chance to use his business skills and scale the corporate ladder.

“What I found out was that it was more important that you schmooze and play golf with the big boys. I had a boss who … did some very shady stuff to show the performance he needed. When I saw that, I got very discouraged. I started to dislike management more

“In the end, the business culture really didn’t fit into what I wanted for my life.”

He left disenchanted and decided to take a six-month tour around the country.

“I went for my walkabout,” he said.

TURNING NOTEBOOKS INTO SKETCHBOOKS

Seymour-Davies met a man named T.J. after a few months on the road.  That meeting in Niagara, N.Y., had a profound impact on his life.

T.J. was an art school graduate who lived a nomadic lifestyle providing ski instruction in the winter and white water rafting lessons during the warmer months. He made his own sketchbooks and showed them to Seymour-Davies.

T.J. encouraged Seymour-Davies to use his notebook journals as sketchbooks and start drawing again for the first time in years.

“He gave me a lot of really positive feedback,” Seymour-Davies said. “I started sketching again and really found a joy in something I’d abandoned.”

Together, they spent three or four weeks traveling together, but after six months on the road and 20 states, Seymour-Davies decided it was time to go home.

He started working on his degree in fine arts after he returned from that trip, creatively reawakened from his travels.

MAKING IT

Seymour-Davies sold his first piece of art for a $100 to a neighbor who wanted a sketch of he and his wife. Seymour-Davies was still a student in Fayetteville’s art program.  He felt he’d done a good job with the piece at the time. Looking back, Seymour-Davies knows that was a student’s wishful thinking.

“I ripped him off. I wasn’t very good,” he admits now.

He said he ran into the couple years later and the husband introduced him as the man who drew the sketch of them. He couldn’t tell from the man’s body language if they were pleased or disappointed about the art he created for him, but is inclined to think his earliest commercial work isn’t displayed prominently in their home.

As a student and during his early years as a commercial artist, he would work in a frenzy, marathon painting binges of 12, 24 and 26 hours to complete a work.

“I’d load up on caffeine and stay up all night. I was completely manic. I would go into my art studio up on campus. Turn on my music and then when everyone left, jam it … I just took over the whole place with my music blasting loud,” he said.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he said.

He’s found a pattern of daily work that follows a more regular pace. It suits him and it seems to be working.

He’s sold several pieces in the past two years. Not yet enough to sustain himself completely as an artist, but each year, a little more.

The money he makes now pays for the art supplies – the paints, the canvas, the studio rental, and a small salary for himself. He and his girlfriend, Linda, also run a dog walking business to help subsidize expenses.

He’s hopeful that at some point soon he can make an adequate wage as an artist.

“I’m going to keep doing this no matter what. The issue will be if it remains a full-time job or something I do on the side,” he said.

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