SIMPLE PLEASURES OF SYMMETRY AND ELOQUENCE
Hovering somewhere between his chakra and his mind’s eye, Seth Arcane‘s innate sense of balance gives his work the confounding luster that sets it apart from similar ventures. Pushing past the simple pleasures of symmetry and eloquence, Seth’s tattoos are linked in the connections they represent. They aren’t storytelling pieces as much as they are physical extensions of states of mind, images that are not lost in their own abstraction but rather feed off of it. Custom to the core, they hold a private significance that is always subject to change and that way, the tattoo is evolving constantly despite its unmovable permanence.
Artwork centered around geometry, with its spiraling pattern work and vanishing points tends to melt into a single expanse of blurred lines and repetition. Seth Arcane’s portfolio, however, builds momentum through experimentation, and though his signature style prevails, it functions differently in each piece. There’s the classic mandala, which in this case either takes its familiar lotus-like shape or becomes a background cradling, for example, a lion’s head. The mandala principles actually shadow a majority of Seth’s work, no matter what the image may be- the fine line work, the shapeshifting, the circular frame- they’re all there, an eternal element of his creative subconscious.
The conceptual definition of modernity stresses an acceptance and acknowledgement of change; to allow metamorphosis is to allow existence. Seth’s tattoos speak to that idea, from their exploration of color and texture to their unorthodox composition. Take one of his renderings of a bird, for example. The creature in the image is raven like, a stealthy black and grey portrait of a spirit in motion- quintessential, except for the geometric additions to its body and the white space around it. Seth gives the bird a different identity than the one we are used to- mystical, and on a deeper level than the sparrows decorating neo- flower child forearms everywhere in a collective display of passion. He does the same to the increasingly popular hexagon design, interpreting the entity of life through an innovative and multi-faceted lens. Every pairing, every shape adjusted ever so slightly to the curve of a bicep is highly intentional, and it’s that unwavering understanding that propels Seth’s vision forward.
Seth’s line of work leans towards the spiritual, the mathematical and the universal, as he creates his own pictographic jargon to spin messages instead of tales. On a technical level, he is nuanced, with a solid foundation built on years of experience. Content- wise, he has an uncanny relationship with the symbolic potential of all that surrounds him, and it comes through in his visual interpretations. Seth is currently working out of Australia’s Authentink Tattoo.
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