Landscape as Earth Art:Element, Time and the Ocean of the Mind
By Paul Seftel | Seftel Gallery, Cerrillos, New Mexico
Landscape has never been a backdrop in my work. It is not scenery, description, or illustration. Landscape is an event, a convergence of matter, time, sensation, and mind, where the physical Earth meets perception and feeling.
The paintings that emerge from my studio are grounded in the physical Earth, yet oriented toward something larger: a planetary, cosmic, and deeply emotional field of experience, a place where color, texture, and scale evoke both belonging and yearning.
This approach places the work in quiet dialogue with Earth Art, while extending beyond it, inward into feeling, and outward into space.
Earth Art Reimagined: From Terrain to Inner Landscape
Earth Art traditionally situates the artist directly within the land, stone, soil, wind, horizon. My work shares this foundation, but the terrain is translated onto the surface of the canvas. The materials themselves are not symbolic; they are literal.
Mineral pigments, limestone, copper oxides, and phosphorescent compounds are formed by geological pressure and planetary time.
They carry weight and memory. When they are layered, eroded, and allowed to react with light, they do not depict the Earth, they are the Earth, reorganized through perception.
This is landscape as material intelligence, shaped by gravity, chemistry, and time.
The Elements as Emotional Structure
The landscapes are built through the classical elements, each carrying both physical and emotional charge:
• Earth — density, gravity, grounding, the pull downward into depth
• Water — flow, suspension, erosion, longing, the sense of immersion
• Air — breath, atmosphere, height, openness, distance
• Fire — transformation, oxidation, inner heat, phosphorescent glow
• Aether — the invisible field: space, vibration, resonance, silence
These elements are not separate. They pass through one another, just as they pass through us. The paintings become fields where states change from solid to liquid, surface to depth, stillness to movement.
Chasms and Heights: Feeling the Landscape
Emotion enters the work through scale and contrast. Deep chasms of color open beside luminous heights. Textures fracture, then soften. Some surfaces feel eroded, others suspended, as if hovering just above collapse. Not just symbolic gestures; they are sensations. The feeling of standing at an edge. The pull of depth. The yearning toward light.
Color plays a central role here. Certain blues suggest both deep water and infinite sky. Reds and ochres carry heat, iron, and the memory of planetary cores. Phosphorescent passages absorb light and release it slowly, echoing the way feeling itself accumulates and lingers.
The landscape becomes emotional terrain, a place where longing, awe, and stillness coexist.
The Ocean of the Mind, the Ocean of Time
I often think of the mind as an ocean. Vast, layered, and in constant motion.
There is an ocean of thought, an ocean of memory, an ocean of time. We move through these inner seas while traveling through space on a mineral body orbiting a star.
The paintings attempt to hold that scale. They are not narratives, but environments, places where the viewer can enter and drift. Time in the work is not abstract. It has texture. Layers settle. Pigments migrate. Light alters the surface over hours, seasons, years.
Each painting becomes a body of time, a body of thought, and ultimately a body of art.
Color, Light, and Planetary Perspective
Color in my work is geological and astronomical rather than decorative. It speaks the language of stone, water, and sky. Phosphorescent surfaces reference celestial cycles, absorption, release, return, mirroring the rhythms of night, orbit, and renewal.
This planetary perspective is essential. We are not separate from these systems. We exist inside them. The same forces that shape mountains andoceans also shape consciousness, memory, and emotion.
The paintings hold this awareness quietly, grounded in Earth, oriented toward the cosmos.
Landscape as Experience
To stand before these works is not to look at a place, but to enter a state. The landscape is felt as much as seen. It is both intimate and immense, tied to the Earth beneath our feet and the vastness above us. At Seftel Gallery in Cerrillos, New Mexico, the landscape continues beyond the horizon and into the work itself. These paintings are invitations, to slow down, to feel depth and height, to sense time and light, and to recognize ourselves as part of a larger, ongoing field of mind, matter and emotion.
Collectors are invited to experience the work in person, where surface, scale, and light can be fully felt rather than described.
Paul Seftel is a contemporary artist based in Cerrillos, New Mexico. His work explores landscape as a convergence of Earth, time, emotion, and consciousness, using mineral-based pigments and light-reactive materials to create immersive, elemental paintings.