Art from the Heart: Jane Seymour Returns to Stone Harbor with Her Latest Exhibition
Mother and Child on the Beach
Stone Harbor’s Ocean Galleries will feature “Jane Seymour: Up Close and Personal: The Exhibition” from July 1-10, and the award-winning actress and artist will be on hand to meet visitors on July 1, 2 and 3.
Blessed with the gift of creativity from a young age, Seymour recalls making gifts and cards for family and friends as a little girl. It was a family tradition she and her sisters enjoyed as youngsters and have carried on with their own children and grandchildren.
“It’s always been more valuable to us to actually put time into creating something especially for someone — a card or a little painting or a sculpture,” says Seymour. “So that’s how I started.”
As a teenager, Seymour made her own clothes, and while studying at a school for the performing arts she made ends meet by creating embroidered blouses, which were soon being sold in high-end British boutiques.
Having gone on to become a successful actress, in midlife Seymour endured a traumatic divorce from a man who squandered her money and drove her into bankruptcy. During this devastating time, her mother’s words of wisdom helped her to move forward:
“My mother had always told me that, in life, everyone has challenges and when you do, your natural instinct is to close up your heart and not let anyone know. But if you could accept it, open up your heart and reach out in some way to help someone else, there’s always someone worse off than you.”
Following her mother’s advice, Seymour took the last of her money and made a gift to the nonprofit Childhelp to help victims of child abuse. Through this donation she met an artist who offered to teach her watercolor painting, which Seymour describes as “color and pigment and transparency, the element of water and the essence of how you’re feeling that day and where it moves, and I was spellbound. I just said, ‘Wow, this is it.’ ”
Soon after, Seymour was cast in “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” and between takes she would paint. “That was my zen,” she recalls, adding that crew members loved her paintings so she had prints made for them at Christmas.
Of course, Seymour’s acting career has continued to flourish. Her most recent TV series, the detective drama “Harry Wild,” has been renewed for a second season on Acorn TV.
And she’s traveled a parallel path to success as an artist and designer. One of her paintings was featured on a Private Issue Discover Card and sold at New York’s Guggenheim Museum for $25,000 to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Her artwork has also been exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington and Ohio’s Butler Institute of American Art.
Seymour is looking forward to returning to Ocean Galleries, where she has exhibited her work twice before. This exhibition features 120 pieces, everything from watercolors to giclees, to oils, acrylics and sculptures. “I’ve developed some new techniques, new styles, new images, things no one has seen,” says Seymour.
How does the exhibition illustrate the “up close and personal” aspect of her work? “I paint for my own joy, so each painting has its own story behind it,” says Seymour. “When I say ‘Up Close and Personal,’ it means that when a person sees something and says, ‘Oh, I love that,’ I can actually give them the inside story of why I painted it, what it means to me, and when it happened.”
As for her memories of Stone Harbor, she says, “I always get inspiration when I go there. I love seeing lots of people with their [beach] umbrellas, tiny figures against the vast ocean. I keep meaning to do one of those sorts of paintings.”
And Seymour had a story to share about “Mother and Child on the Beach,” which appears on this month’s Seven Mile Times cover: “I went to Laguna Beach one day and I invited anyone in the community who wanted to be in my paintings to come wearing white. All they had to do was just have fun on the beach and all these people showed up! Some were moms, some were little kids, and they were all wearing white. White is great because it’s every color of the rainbow and it kind of unifies the idea of the painting.”
As for raising her own children, Seymour recalls: “I never imagined motherhood as being as rewarding, life-fulfilling, and frustrating and difficult as it is,” then adds, “my kids are all doing really, really well.” Seymour’s children are adults now with careers in music, art, internet design, filmmaking and photography. In fact, her exhibition will feature four fine-art photographs by her son, Sean Flynn. Seymour sees the photos as collaboration because she is the woman in the images, but she’s quick to point out that the images are not about her; they are about “the ocean, the sky, and the world.”
Asked about the focus of her artwork, Seymour says: “I paint hope and I paint community.” Reflecting on the creation of her “Open Hearts” design, she recalls, “every time I painted a heart, I thought of my mother’s ‘open your heart.’ And then I thought, ‘I wonder what happens if I link one open heart to another?’” What happened was the creation of an iconic image that she trademarked (while brushing aside the advice of lawyers who said she couldn’t trademark a heart!), and which appears in her paintings, sculptures, and fabric and jewelry collections.
Open Hearts is much more than a design for Seymour; it’s a plan for living: “I hope that what I inspire people to do is to go, ‘Ouch, that’s immeasurably painful,’ pause, accept — the hardest thing to do — open your heart and reach out and see if right next to you there’s someone you can help, and they help the one next to them. If you start spreading it like a positive virus, there is hope for everybody.
“I would say that the greatest joy for me is meeting people and hearing what the open heart means to them. They’ll tell me something about their life, and what this image does is give people permission and an invitation to talk about stuff that they don’t usually get to talk about it. I think my mother’s wisdom is universal—it’s a universal symbol of giving and receiving love.”