Wayne Seyb

For background on the artist and works, see below.

Current Works

About the Artist

Wayne Seyb’s vigorous oil paintings often capture the raw energy of the New Zealand landscape, an expression of feeling of place rather than a literal interpretation. He typically uses intense colour applied boldly and thickly, in sweeping strokes to express his response the mountains, rivers and coastline of the South Island. Seyb has also worked on woodcuts throughout his career, and these prints have the typical energy, immediacy and expressiveness of his paintings, with an additional directness which derives from the precise demands of the medium.

Recent Works

In early 2024, the artist’s daughter gave him a 12-month pass up the gondola over the Christchurch Port Hills, sparking a regular series of journeys and new perspectives on familiar places. The works were necessarily of one size, although later he also did works in the studio.

Alongside these works, he continued to paint other subjects, such as a homage to one of his artistic heroes, Vincent Van Gogh – the painting Drawings from Vincent’s Pocket based on drawings said to have been found in van Gogh’s pocket at his death and published in a biography. Seyb aligned the two drawings to produce this stunning painting.

In 2022, Seyb was the first recipient of the Margaret Stoddart Residency, spending time in the landscape of the Stoddart property at Purau on Banks Peninsula near Christchurch. The first landscapes, exhibited here at The Diversion, captured the essence of light on the land and coast, and the intensity of the artist’s response to the landscape, such as The Washup, Purau.

Of his landscapes, Seyb says you have to have an imaginative hook, to look at the landscape, Seyb says, because otherwise it is just the picturesque. “I like to look at it as something symbolic. It gives a more symbolic edge to the landscape which is what inspires me to paint.” Seyb is never self-conscious in creating paintings – it has always been about his instinctive and personal response to what is happening immediately around him, what he actually sees. Wherever he travels – around the country and overseas – he responds to the landscape, history, art history and literature of the place.

More About the Artist

Born in Temuka in 1961, Wayne Seyb studied formally for a year at Otago before leaving to pursue his individualist direction. He set up a co-operative gallery, Artattack, in 1981, and has since exhibited regularly in dealer and public galleries throughout New Zealand, and in Germany. Wayne Seyb and his family lived for a decade in Karitane near Dunedin, its landscape inspiring much of his painting. They moved to Christchurch in 1999, when the Port Hills, the Southern Alps and West Coast of the South Island became a new field of inspiration, although Otago and Southland continue to feature strongly in his paintings.