Terre Lamb Seeley has been drawing and painting since she was a very small child. Her family founded the oldest stained glass studio in the United States and she grew up in a home environment of art and art history. She became a painter after college where she had studied music and went on to create the calendar series “A Year in a Country House” which was first published in 1991. It was comprised of paintings done of the 17th century Martha’s Vineyard house where she lived with her husband and children, and became a popular publication in the Cape and Islands area. Many of the paintings were used by the H. George Caspari greeting card company as greeting cards and were also shown in Martha’s Vineyard galleries for several years. The series continued when she moved to Cape Cod in 1995 and started a small gallery café with her brother in the early 2000s. Throughout those years she was also illustrating the three books which became the series about the famous Black Dog of the Martha’s Vineyard restaurant and retail business, beginning with “The Story of the Little Black Dog”. After raising her family she returned to artwork and incorporated into it journaling about gardening, herbalism, and the flora and fauna of her surroundings. She is at present continuing the calendar series using her 1850’s Cape Cod house, barns and gardens and another family home in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, also an antique house, as subject matter. She continues to illustrate books for children, and to write and paint about her homes and gardens.

The Natural World-        

Animals, Plants- and Houses      

        Are old houses really a part of nature? Well- they certainly can become so. The important houses in my life are all in the 150-year-plus range, with the exception of the house that used to belong to my brother, which doesn't save it from being in a constant state of resistance to natural entropy along with the older ones! I guess that last is a bit redundant- but so is the constant assault  of natural processes on walls, roofs, windows, brick and stone paths and walls- everything.  How does this relate to what I do? Well I like to think that my  home offers some peripheral shelter to the critters I'm so interested in following and documenting. If an animal lives alongside of us, albeit in its own milieu,  there's so much more opportunity to observe.     And chronicling the daily adventures and developments of our little fellow denizens is what I've found myself doing for the past thirty five years- pretty much as soon as I found myself living my ideal romantic life style when I moved to New England in 1982.        

Watercolor and Gouache

         The materials I use for all my illustrative work are watercolour and gouache- an opaque form of watercolour- and watercolour pencils along with drawing and drafting pencils for sketching and layouts. While I love oil painting I need to be able to take whatever I'm working on with me anywhere, and to work outside it's important to me to work from life and the immediate situation as much as possible. Watercolors and pencils also are great for journaling. I also like to play with collage for certain projects as I love different types of papers and fabrics, especially when bits of actual nature are in the mix- leaves, flowers, bark- whatever.