Meet Séraphine ….

Séraphine, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
1 – Having experienced an accumulation of many major traumas, I decided, perhaps as far back as 7 years old, that I just had to get past an experience for my situation to get better.

2 – I grew up in humid Louisiana Cajun Country and the Mississippi Gulf Coast. When I went off to college, everyone was painting with oil paints. However oils took many months to dry on the surface while the under-sides sometimes took years to fully dry. My painting instructor, Allen Jones, introduced me to a “new” medium to paint with – acrylics. In Louisiana these paints worked much like the oils but dried within hours. This opened a whole new world to my life as an artist.

3 – When I moved to California, the lack of humidity affected both my body and my abilities to work with acrylic paint. I had to work faster. I worked in a small room full of plants and many humidifiers. It was much like painting in a nursery’s green house. I learned to paint depending on the seasons, the times of day, rain or drought and the intensity of the exterior sunlight. For me it is painting with wherever I am. I’ve even tried to paint “en plein air” in Scotland in their misty rain. However the mist kept washing my paint off the canvas. So I learned to paint in the rain. Sometimes, now I comfortably paint for 3 or 4 hours while other times I can put in a good 6 or 7 hours. Basically, what I learned about my painting “obsession” is I must paint within whatever environment I am working.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
At first I was thrown by you asking to speak to my brand so I changed the word to signature. I dress a bit different than others and have done so even when I was a student in a Catholic Boarding School on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Back then I made a point not to wear the uniform exactly as everyone.  I love hats and recall being impressed at how beautiful Audrey Hepburn pulled off her elegant look, with hats. At this time I must have about 30 different western cowboy hats. In Tokyo at the 19th Japan International Exchange, at the National Art Center (2019), I chose a silk top hat which I hand beaded in the style of Native American beadwork. Whenever I go out I grab a hat to complete my look. I seem to get recognized now because people see the hat and seem to recognize that I am an artist, heck I have paint on almost all my clothes. I always tell myself, “I am not one of the billions, I am myself.” As young woman I worked at a hardware store in Van Nuys, CA. I was employed working forBullocks department store in the underwear department where I designed the concept that the merchandize should be removed from the drawers and hung on the same small hangers used in the “foundation department – bra department”. I color coordinated the underwear by styles and sizes. Now wherever you go around the world, you will find ladies intimate wear hung on small hangers. That was my concept.
At a solo paintings exhibition in the French Quarter of New Orleans I heard my work reminded them of Georgia O’Keeffe. I’d never heard of her. I didn’t want to see her work because I wanted my work to be totally mine with influence from no one. On the drive back to California with my paintings, I decided to stopped in Santa Fe determined to meet this artist. I asked for directions saying, I was supposed to meet Ms O’Keeffe. I sat outside her home, plein air painting her house. I was frustrated with my painting, thinking I had no idea how to paint anything other than macro painting. That’s when she sent someone out to bring me into her studio.
Ms O’Keeffe reviewed the paintings I had in my car and told me I very much know how to paint however I needed to reach into my spirit and add my spirit into my pieces.

Back in California I began working as a background artist at Hanna-Barbara Animation Studios. It was my job to match the backgrounds with the movements of the characters in the cartoons. If Fred Flintstone was supposed to run into the door of his house, and the door was in the wrong place, it was my job to move the door. I ended up learning to copy the styles of the 14 other background painters. I loved the work

While driving into San Francisco for my first California solo exhibit, I was kidnapped.  When I returned to Hanna-Barbara I found I could not paint. Eventually I left that job because of the trauma.  I applied for and was accepted into the advertising and graphic design department at Art Center College of Design. At Art Center I was told my hats were not proper business attire; I still wore them.
If someone told me I couldn’t do something, that was an invitation to actually go ahead and do it. After graduating I went to work for a Beverly Hills agency, but decided to open my own design firm from, in that way I could continue to paint when “between” jobs.

When the personal computer hit the world and my bread and butter small clients were “doing the ads themselves” with templets. I again changed directions but again, I worked out of my house. I bought a decal/sticker plotting machine and zeroed in of creating for the electric power industry. I was making hundreds of custom stickers a week and continuing to paint and exhibit.
In 2020 Aafter a major eye injury, I stopped making stickers; gave my equipment to an enterprising young person and began painting full time as I did in the 60’s and 70’s… all the while collecting and wearing my uniquely personalized western hats. In Tokyo I took a photo of a sign at a store that said it all, “Life’s too short to wear boring clothes…” and well, that’s me.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
As a person who strives to compete in all I do, one of the negative impacts on me through a good portion of my earlier years was not getting positive verbal feedback. Those around me never let me know they thought I was OK and was doing well. From my point of view, I heard I was stupid; I was lazy; I just didn’t want to learn.   I always felt like I had 5 arms, 3 heads, and even in my own thoughts I would beat myself down. I had no clue that others thought I was extremely successful, cute/pretty, talented, smart. I just kept working at not slipping into slip into self criticism and depression.

Advice I have for folks who are early in their careers  of how they can best develop or improve on these in those areas? DON’T GIVE UP. YOU ARE THE JUDGE OF WHO YOU ARE. Set a high goal for yourself and direct yourself always toward that goal, even if you are working at a job that you think is not part of your goal, further along you will be surprised how that past is really leading you to your goal.
In 1967 I entered and was accepted into a museum exhibition. In the following years, I achieved many other levels of success with my artwork, but it was not until 2014 that I began to feel the success I was working toward. I remember walking through the Masters of the American West Exhibition at the Autry Museum with a friend. I began to cry. Of course he wanted to know why. I said, “My work is good enough to be here.” That was the moment I decided to stop showing at festivals and small galleries and concentrate on getting my work where I felt it should be shown.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
Several people have blessed me with their help along my artistic journey. I think of Allen Jones, my first painting instructor who introduced me to Acrylic Paint during my first semester of college. Following, in 1967, my first public showing, was at the New Orleans Museum of Art. When my teacher saw me there, he thanked me for coming to see his work. I remember how proud I was to tell him, that I was there to see my work. He then moved me from my freshman painting class to the senior level; he even gave me an office to paint in, “to keep the boys away”, he said – so I could work undisturbed.

Another monumental person in my l career was mentoring for a short while with artist Georgia O’Keeffe. I was returning from a solo exhibition in New Orleans’ French Quarter with a carload of paintings. She had me remove all my pieces; at which time she critiqued every one of them. Ms O’Keeffe told me she had no doubt I could paint. She gave me a book about painting and advised me to be completely aware of the surface I put my painting on, canvas, stretcher bars etc. to make sure the paintings live on past my lifetime. It was her personal book, however the information in it was all related to oil painting and I could not relate. I gifted it to talented oil painter who was as excited to receive it from me as I was.

I was definitely influenced by Vicki Vessier (my younger sister) whose powerful photographic views of nature and macro-views of the natural world were the motivation behind my return to water drop painting some twenty years later. A collection of VIVE’S Photography can be seen on my website www.longshodowstudio.com

Julienne Johnson was the curator/producer who propelled my dreams to realization, when she first curated my work into the 19th Japan International Exchange, at the National Art Center Tokyo (2019); after that, she included my paintings in exhibitions at the Chiba City Museum of Art (2021 in Chiba City, Japan) and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2022, 2023, Tokyo, Japan). These museums are all consistently near the top of the 100 most visited museums in the world. Julienne is a multi-disciplinary artist whose art is in private and museum permanent collections world wide; and her Grammy and Dove Award nominated songs, music and poetry, has been published, translated and distributed internationally. Julienne has become my mentor, my friend and representative. She continues to encourage me as I pursue my 1967 life goal. As I told Georgia O’Keeffe, “I will paint until I can no longer lift a brush.”