HISTORY
Cody Seekins was born in Jamestown, North Dakota in 1977 and then quickly relocated to live in Kaiserslautern, Germany at a few months old; initiating his childhood as a military brat. By high school graduation Cody had lived in over seven United States, in addition to Italy, and a second tour in Germany.
Cody’s interest in fine art began through concurrent influences; the cover art of fantasy and science fiction novels which enthralled his imagination, and the saturation of cultural history woven into the fabric of European society. As a boy living in Naples, Italy, his mother took private painting lessons from a professional Neapolitan artist, introducing into the home a crucial sense of personal relevance to the arts.
As a late teenager and young adult Cody became hooked into art making as a platform for psychological exploration. Shortly thereafter he attended Wichita State University in Kansas where he earned his B.A. in Studio Art. During his tenure Cody was awarded a Freeman Asia grant used to live in Bangkok, Thailand for 6 months; traveling throughout the region and studying Buddhist Institutions at Thammasat University.
Between earning his bachelor’s degree and submitting to attend the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California, Cody lived in Frederick, Maryland, where he was accepted into faculty at both the Delaplaine Center for Visual Arts Education and Frederick Community College.
In May 2013 Cody earned his MFA in Figurative Painting from AAU.
Since then, Cody has been traveling the world and painting. Most recently he spent 2 years in Southeast Asia, Australasia, Japan, and Cancun. Within the next couple years, Cody intends to develop a new complete body of paintings while living in Thailand.
STATEMENT
The Encounter
As I clear my conscious mind it peels away to reveal the vast unconscious dimensions of my greater being. Because this awareness produced in me a natural affinity for eastern thought I refer to my works as “Jātaka Tales” or simply “Jātakas”. I see the challenges, enigmas, sentiments, and ephemera of my experience as similar to the historical 3rd person Jātaka narratives of Gautama Buddha prior to his enlightenment. The term “Budgie-Sattva” within my oeuvre is an appropriation combining the word budgie (parrot) with “bodhisattva”, or one who is still on the path toward perfect awareness.
The traditional Jātaka tales are an interesting collection of Buddhist allegories which recognize the subjective journey toward enlightenment by illustrating the groundwork an individual goes through. That groundwork manifests as incarnations of personal identity, experience, and learning; a framework allowing me to build a body of paintings pulling from my exterior and interior life. Traditional Jātaka tales describe multiple past lives of the Gautama Buddha, where each identity is a separate incarnation. In my works, these multiple incarnations of self are contained within one life. In effect, I am narrating contemporary Jātaka tales from the 1st person perspective.