Harkawik is pleased to announce Single Landscapes, our eighth collaboration with painter John Seal. Here Seal eschews the multiple registers and elaborate framing devices with which we have become familiar, collapsing his concerns into a single large landscape format, and presenting his chosen subject with a powerful consistency and concision. Seal’s project is heavily invested in a sociological examination of the role of the artist in society, and a recapitulation of the conditions of creative and intellectual practice; here this examination occurs paradoxically in the simple act of creation, and in the sacrosanct encounter we may have with its product. What’s at issue here is encoded exclusively in the very specific execution of the painting itself—in its buttery skies, slightly impasto foliage, in the long cleaved marks that delineate broken wood or stalks sprouting from the earth toward the sun. It is precisely because Seal’s ambition lies beyond the creation of pictures that there’s so much to find within them.