About

Born in London in 1974, Paul Seftel is a British–American artist and writer whose work explores the intersection of material process, systems of meaning, and lived experience. Working across painting, writing, and publishing, his practice examines how structure, choice, and authorship shape both cultural production and inner life.

At eighteen, Seftel left home to travel solo across the United States and abroad, looking to the land and sky for inspiration. From the concrete canyons of NYC, the deserts and mountains of the southwest, and the jungles and temples of Central America, these formative experiences established a lifelong engagement with earth-based materials and with the relationship between perception, memory, and transformation.

Educated in London and Edinburgh, Seftel later lived and worked in New York, California, and Colorado before settling near Santa Fe, New Mexico, a landscape that has informed his work for more than three decades. His mineral-based paintings incorporate materials such as limestone, marble dust, copper, mica, iron, and phosphorescent pigments, producing light-reactive surfaces that shift as the viewer moves. Each work functions as an excavation, layering material and emotion into surfaces that bridge ancient and contemporary processes, where geology meets memory and surface becomes time.