“Drawing and painting,
combined with a need to
escape to the wilderness,
has been the key
constant in my life.”

Ted Seeberg inherited his interest in art from his father (also Ted Seeberg), a talented designer and painter in his own right. His formal training as an artist was limited to a single year at the Vancouver School of Art (the precursor to The Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design) as well as drawing classes at the community college level.

After a brief stint as a “starving artist” in his early twenties, Ted veered toward the traditional, studying architecture and building technology. He worked for various firms including Bruno Freschi Architects, a well-respected design oriented practice that fostered a creative environment.

Despite his conventional career path, Ted continued to fulfill his need for artistic expression – sketching, drawing, painting and escaping to the wilderness for inspiration as often as possible. His only hiatus from art was in the mid-eighties, when he focused on building his own company Ted Seeberg Design Ltd.

Once it was established, Ted eagerly returned to painting, his style mature and distinct, and now devotes a couple of days every week to his art. Future plans include dedicating even more time to painting, and to enjoying life in Vancouver with wife Sylvia Males.

Preferring to express himself in the abstract, and the idea of veiled images in general, Ted holds several figurative and abstract painters in high esteem. In particular he admires the distorted and strange personal imagery of Phillip Guston and Francis Bacon, the unselfconscious ugliness and immediacy of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well as the intuitive bio morphic forms created by Jackson Pollock while he was going through his Jungian psychoanalysis.

When it comes to his own work, Ted Seeberg is uninterested in recreating “pretty” views, nor does he expect that others will share his interpretation or even his reactions to his art. His goal is to define his own visual grammar and create an intuitive body of work that represents a processing of experience.

Over the years, Ted Seeberg’s work has been on display in Vancouver at Artropolis, the Architectural Institute of BC, and most recently in the main lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel.