Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Nettie Seip has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.

Nettie is an award-winning artist based in Ontario, Canada. Nettie was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 17th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her art to be showcased in this feature.

Nettie’s Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to over 350+ major news outlets, with inclusion on Google News & Bing News. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.

Below are Nettie’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 images that were submitted to this competition.

Artist Biography

Nettie Seip started photography later in life having first worked in the field of science after receiving her MSc at McMaster U. Although Nettie loved science, she always felt like there was something amiss in her life and so she turned to re-educating herself at Sheridan College in Photography and Digital Arts.

She won many awards for her photography and her work has been widely exhibited in Mississauga and Toronto. Nettie also taught Photoshop and Lightroom to an art collective in Toronto and is part of a team of photographers documenting the Lakeview Project. Nettie has been published in the Globe, Mail and Toronto star and has won awards with the Mississauga Camera Club, the Photographic Society of America, Touched by Fire Toronto, and HM for the Creative Community Award at the Mississauga Martys. As well, Nettie has been an active volunteer in the community of Mississauga photographing events and received the community Adult Volunteer Excellence Award for Mississauga in 2019.

Inspired by a long list of photographers including Ansel Adams, Yosuf Karsch, Irving Penn, Bill Brandt, Phillippe Halsman, Dianne Arbus, Michael Thompson and Annie Liebovitz, Nettie specialized in portrait photography. Loving people and their emotional journeys' through life is communicated through her works and are her constant inspiration. Nettie’s work shows both the struggle people endure caused by trapped suppressed emotions and the freedom felt when these emotions are expressed.

Nettie has created an ongoing series entitled Life’s Journey. Recently Nettie has moved to rural eastern Ontario to the small town called Alexandria. All part of Nettie’s Life's Journey.

Artist Statement

I have always loved photography. I found it captivating as a child to take film of my family, freezing their expressions and waiting excitedly to get the processed film back. In my family, there was a lot of emotional suppression and emotional expression was viewed as a weakness. Moreover, my parents didn’t view photography as a career for a woman. Consequently, I went to university, graduated with an MSc, got married, had a great job and did everything I was supposed to do, but those emotions I suppressed, well, they began to surface and I had no idea how to control them. I was a prisoner; I was trapped.

One day I saw a man photographing the sun rising over the lake and I remembered my camera. I went over and asked him what camera to buy. We stayed in touch for many years as I became a photographer in training, quit my job in the science field and went back to school to Sheridan to learn digital photography. Photography allowed me to see the world differently and feel and express myself. Digital art took this to the next step by allowing my imagination to come alive, using Photoshop.

And so the series Life’s Journey evolved to assist me in the expression of trapped emotions. What I found out was that all the people I photographed were also trapped somewhere in their life, and so the photos reflected both their journey and mine. I became friends with everyone I photographed and they are all significant milestones in my own life’s journey. The series now embodies twenty pieces and will continue as my journey continues.

Nettie’s website is www.nettiephotography.com.