Seth Tane

Towers fascinate me. Elegant and minimal in their use of raw materials to trace the critical stress diagram of winds and other loads, they're line drawings of engineering. It only adds to my appreciation that they can be built out of a pile of angle iron and nuts & bolts for "easy" transport and set-up anywhere. In an earlier era, they were riveted together, and I'm always looking out for the visual joy of the rivet shadows and patina of the older towers on my travels. In the waterfront rail yard in Jersey City where we lived on our ship in the early '80s, there were very tall lighting towers with a spetacular view of lower Manhattan that had a 4' x 8' platform at the top where a visiting friend once spent the night. I only wish I'd had the means to preserve one...But perhaps good things do come to those who wait.

While in NYC recently I was lucky to find a 36' tall riveted tower accessible with a little effort and in good enough condition to encourage some serious thinking about it as sculpture. The rendering in the photo shows it installed on a buried steel base to counter-balance the oblique lean I'm interested in. I've also fooled with several variations of added glass insulators, copper rod elements, bases and even kinking it in the middle, while I'm working on the logisitics and finding a home for it. It's a presence that speaks of obsolescence, communication and transportation in our new wireless world. On my long drives I frequently follow many miles of abandoned telegraph poles with multiple wires in disarray along the rail lines and wonder what happened during the transition to leave all that copper and infrastructure in place to decay.

Not to leave it at just one tower, my son alerted me to a Craigslist ad for an 80' galvanized steel one much closer to home at a local scrapyard. That one turned out to be a modern, bolted beauty in perfect condition that I was able to buy for a song and quickly dismantle, load and transport home working alone, after it had been taken down and separated into four sections. It was originally used for training wind turbine technicians but has too many possibilities to sort out at the moment, including using the lower 20' or 40' of it to build a fire-lookout studio/cabin on and making sculpture out of all or part of it. It awaits behind my shop with one section dismantled, two upright for climbing and consideration, and the top on it's side looking like a ready-made of significant proportions.

A round about way indeed to all of this heavy metal distraction from my painting, which is still a full-time effort. Have a look at the most recent batch of five little ones here: https://www.sethtane.com/work, and note the tower on the right side of https://www.sethtane.com/work/hudson-line- and https://www.sethtane.com/work/woodhaven-line, sisters to Tower Oblique, it all connects. In a big way. What underlies what and how I see the world around me has a lot to do with a lifetime of direct, hands-on experience with tools, grease and patience. I paint from that perspective, drilling each hole in the bridge, welding the beams with my brush. Even at this late date I still keep my hands in it. After we thinned a few acres of replant fir trees on our property a few years back I decided I liked log skidders and kept a lookout for that mythical $1,000 skidder with my name on it. I found it, along with another one within a couple hundred miles of the ranch and bought the pair of them to end up with one keeper. That one had ingested several gallons of rain water through an uncovered air intake for a few years and was seized up tight, which served to conceal many other operational problems. The other machine was supposed to be a runner, but it took some epic long hours in a field playing Detroit diesel mechanic by flashlight after midnight to get it barely mobile enough for the trucker's impending dawn arrival. They say 2-strokes don't build up HP unless you "drive it like you stole it", so I spooled it up and made a charge at his tilt-deck trailer with wanna' be brakes and sketchy steering. Boy howdy have I spent a few moments since wondering why, but so far, so good. She runs, drives and drags timber again.

My wonderful gallery representation: LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM
And as always, you can also contact me directly by email: info@sethtane.com and follow my occasional photo posts on: Instagram