Seth Bastian is an emerging Bahamian artist based in London. He began his college matriculation in marine biology but, after one year, decided to pursue his childhood passion: art.   Seth recalls drawing a portrait photo of Jimi Hendrix in 2013, amid his marine biology program. This reignited a long dormant passion for art. In the Fall of 2013, he enrolled in the Fine Art Department at the University of The Bahamas and after a few years he transferred to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) where, in 2018, he earned his BFA (Hons) in painting. In 2022, Seth graduated from University of Arts London with an MFA in painting.

Seth’s work includes a brand of existential formalism that is blended with abstraction. The aim is to link traditional concepts with contemporary concepts.  Seth believes that by sourcing the formal essence of the old masters techniques to suit a more contemporary expressive purpose,  there often is a dichotomy in his art: rigorous tradition and expressive contemporary spontaneity.To express this Seth uses a dazzling array of honed intuitive strokes that brings the viewer into a personally crafted visual world that pushes the potentials of oil paint and calls the  role of the brush mark and the subject into question. His eccentric figures and vivant, biomorphic forms contain a restless conflict between form and subject that unfold before the viewer’s eye.  Seth’s faith and his love of cinema, music, the ocean, nature, and poetry are the inspirations he uses as an exploratory visual device and as a means of building and exploring the subject to come alive in similar ways.  Forms and subject take life; the contemporary and the traditional visual world coexist. The artist, the viewer and the art are all a part visual world and are coexisting.

 

EXHIBITIONS

Solo

2024

WONDER\SIDE , Indra Gallery, Lonodon, UK

2019

Cornèr Bank Arts Showcase- Cornèr Bank, Nassau, BAH  & Investments Showcase featuring 42 original works 

2016

Sweet Reality Goodman’s Bay Corporate Centre, Nassau, BAH featuring 30 original oil, acrylic paintings


Group

2024

Selected Artist- The Bahamas High Commission Independence Gala, The Savoy Hotel, London UK.

2022 Church/Factory - Copeland/Dilston Grove Galleries, London 

2022 UAL Graduate Showcase - Camberwell College of Arts, London 

2018 117th Annual Student Exhib. Penn. Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia PA, USA 

2016 Transforming Spaces Central Bank of the Bahamas, Nassau, BAH

2015 Transforming Spaces Popop Studios, Nassau, BAH

 


COLLECTIONS 

Nassau Cruise Port - Nassau, BAH 

Love and Responsibility 

the Dawn Davies Collection - Nassau, BAH 

Penn. Academy of Fine Arts Archives Philadelphia, PA, USA 

HLB Galanis & Co. Nassau, BAH 

Britannia Bank and Trust Nassau, BAH