By Victor Greto
The plain white pocketbook set among the red-orange-yellow orgy of splattered paint that makes up Pamella Bounds-Seemans workroom only seems out of place.
“It’s my mom’s,” the artist says. “She had it the day she died.”
That purse is as appropriate – and as surprising – as anything one might see at the idiosyncratic home or artwork of the 59-year-old Delaware native, whom several local art critics and gallery owners call one of the most interesting artists in the state for her feverishly gaudy, jewel-encrusted works of art that range from paintings to jewelry.
The subjects of her paintings include numerous versions of landmark locations throughout Delaware, from DuPont homes in the north to Rehoboth Beach shops in the south
She fills these mixed-media works with her favorite colors, red, orange and yellow, with jewels and studs, glitter and figures with exaggerated features.
“She was the power-figure in the house,” said Bounds-Seemans of her mother.
Marguerite Bounds, who died three years ago at 89, had as much influence on the life and work of her daughter Pamella as any of the any folk or “outsider” artists whose work Bounds-Seemans often is compared to, even with her extensive art training.
Marguerite ran a strict household and had specific ideas about what how her daughter should look, act and prepare for a career in teaching – like herself.
But her mom also loved folk art and filled her home with it, and that helped fuel Pamella’s desire to express herself.
“Her house was like a folk art museum,” Bounds-Seemans says. “It was all very well-ordered.”
Unlike her own home and her garish way of dressing, which, many of those who know her have said, reflects the boldness of the art she has created now for three decades.
Her art seems like a rebellion of her mother’s love for folk art, an attention-getting colorful liberation from all things normal.
Like most “outsider” – untrained and undisciplined – art, it breaks several comfortable categories, and includes mixed-media collages and garishly painted frames.
“You really love it or you really hate it,” says Patty Daniels, who really loves it. She runs the Tideline Gallery in Hockessin.
“I have many people who have collected her work over the years,” she says.
“I smile when I see her stuff,” says Barry Schlecker of Wilmington. He runs an executive recruitment company, founded the Newark Film Festival, and collects folk and outsider art.
“Paper clips, glitter, glass – it’s like she went into a craft shop and bought what was on sale, and then made art out of it. I’m drawn to it.”
The Rehoboth Art League’s Ventures Gallery presented an exhibition of her work that closes today, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” representing three decades of work.
Lee Mills, the league’s interim executive director, calls her work a celebration of local places and landmarks. Some of the sites include Blue Rocks Stadium, the Grand Opera House and Dolle’s Candyland in Rehoboth Beach.
“She’s always revisiting these sites, and brings something extra to them each time.” he says. “Depending on what materials she’s got.”
The only child of Marguerite and Jim Bounds, a farm manager, Pamella grew up in Milton.
She knew early on what her mother wanted her to be: a teacher, just like her. She also knew exactly how her mother wanted her to dress.
“She always laid my clothes out for me before school,” she recalls. “They were always beige.”
Occasionally, she’d cheat and wear red and yellow, a pair of colors whose combination makes up her favorite color, orange.
She did well in English and art and history, and thought she might be a fashion designer.
“But I hated sewing,” she says.
Perhaps the worst part of growing up in Milton was the school. All 12 grades were in one building. Her mother taught the second grade.
Even when Pamella wasn’t in second grade, her mother was a hovering presence in the lunch room.
However, Pam learned a lot by studying her mother’s folk art.
Some of the more enduring techniques Bounds-Seemans learned about creating art came from her grandmother, who lived with them.
“She made platted rugs out of bread wrappers,” she recalls, “coasters out of bottle caps.”
Folk art utilizes everyday things creatively, from crafts and decorations to painting and sculpture.
Bounds-Seemans also discovered that she garnered people’s attention – including her mother’s – when she created things like her grandmother.
But there were times when she wished she didn’t get her mother’s attention.
Pamella kept a diary, and one day her mother got a hold of it.
“She read my diary and I had written in there that I liked a certain boy,” she recalls. “She laughed about it.”
In response, Pamella got a hold of one of her own framed photos, opened it up, and wrote on the back of the picture, “I love you Pam.” She signed it, “Pam.”
One time, her mother brought Pam to a psychotherapist to see if there was anything wrong with her daughter.
“She told Mom I was two years ahead,” Bounds-Seemans says. “That made my mom mad.”
By the time Pam reached 12th grade, she was ready to go.
A teacher told her about an art college in Las Vegas, N.M., called New Mexico Highlands University. She applied and was accepted.
“I wanted to go so far away,” she says. “There was lots of sunshine, more men than women and it was a good place to paint.”
It was liberating. She painted, and even held her first exhibition there, in watercolors, in 1971.
While earning her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts, with a minor in education – “That was for my mother,” she says – her grandmother died, followed six months later by her father, who died of a heart attack at 53.
“That shook me up,” Bounds-Seemans says. “We were close and he was my protector. I was a daddy’s girl. It made me take my studies more seriously.”
She stayed on to earn a Masters in Fine Arts in 1972.
She returned home at her mother’s suggestion.
“I wasn’t as strong as I am now,” she says. “People were telling me to go to Santa Fe to paint, said I was ready. Mom said I had to be a teacher to make it.”
Bounds-Seemans still has nightmares about her experience as an art teacher from 1973-1979 at the Indian River School district.
“Sometimes I dream I don’t have enough glue or paste,” she says. “The principal was always telling me I was spending too much money, and didn’t give me money for art supplies for years.”
She felt like more of an art peddler than a teacher, pushing or pulling an art cart from classroom to classroom.
“I was interested in my own ideas,” Bounds-Seemans says. “I didn’t like telling people how to do things.”
Staying home for a week during a blizzard in the winter of 1979, “I flipped out,” she says.
“It was so wonderful. I dyed my hair purple and walked around with a live skunk around my neck.”
She quit teaching.
Her mother supported her with a “care package” every week, and she painted. And painted. And painted – everything, from what she saw around her, to the mattes and frames of her pictures.
She found she had a drive to fill in every blank space.
This technique belies her more traditional art history education, which in turn belies her claim to be an “outsider” artist.
“It is a kind of outsider art, although she’s formally trained,” says Lee Mills.
But not one will peg her simply a “folk artist.”
“One associates folk art with a leaner, basic take on things,” he says. “She just puts layer upon layer of materials and images, always building and building and building.”
One painting, for example, “Plastic Roses,” consists of three types of paint – watercolor, acrylic and fabric paint – in a glittery array of red, pink, yellow, green and white. The centerpiece, a vase of plastic red roses, is framed by a narrow zigzag of ribbon called rickrack, and a thick black border.
“That’s one criticism I took seriously,” Pam says. “The eye needs a place to rest.”
The frame that holds the painting of the vase is as encrusted with colorful fabric paint as the inside picture. Jewels dot both the inside and frame of the picture.
Her process often includes painting a background of black on a board; doing the actual painting on watercolor paper; gluing this to the background; adding the rickrack for the edges; adding jewels and other collage-able items; and finally painting the frames, which she often obtains at flea markets.
Despite the inability to categorize her, collector Barry Schlecker says, “She’s as whimsical as most outsider artists. It’s a style that’s reminiscent of outsider art. But what she is – it is up there on the canvas.”
Who she is quickly became a presence in Lewes.
“I met her then,” says Ellen Bartholomaus, owner of the Blue Streak Gallery in Wilmington. “She was called the Purple Lady in Lewes.”
She earned her reputation by walking up and down the streets with her art work, asking gallery owners if they would display it.
Gallery owners began saying yes more after a local newspaper ran a feature on her.
“She’s also a good marketing person, which is a great combination,” Schlecker says.
“It’s fun and funky,” says gallery owner Patty Daniels. “She would do local scenes in Delaware and it was a good fit for what we were carrying at the time. Hers were unique and creative, and we devoted a whole wall to her work.”
When Pamella held her first state exhibition in 1981, at Delaware Technical Community College in Georgetown, she bought frames for her pictures. And just couldn’t leave them alone.
“I didn’t want to go to framing shops and pay a fortune, so I painted them myself and decorated them, and it evolved from there,” she says.
“Her aesthetic is driven by what drives an outsider or visionary artist – she works to create a hyper-perception of different places and events,” Lee Mills says. “There’s not one square inch left to do anything with.”
Mills calls her work “celebrational.”
“There’s a certain obsessive quality to it, but in a good way,” he says. “Look at all these people and this activity, sharing this common experience.”
In the summer of 1983, she met Jeffrey Seemans, a landscape architect who at the time was running the flower show at the Hagley Museum.
He was looking for an artist for the show, had read the feature article on her, and was anxious to meet her.
They hit it off quickly, so much so that by November they were engaged and she had moved into his home in Marshallton.
“I told him I had to move from Lewes,” she says. “There were roots in my toilet.”
In Seemans’ old home, formerly a blacksmith shop and listed on the National Historical Register, they raised three children, Misty Autumn, 23, and twins, Sterling Hunter and Jordan Windsor, 22.
“There was lots of color when I was growing up,” says Sterling, about both the content of his mother’s art and her personality.
He recalls days getting up before dawn to help his mother set up exhibits. The relationship between his parents clicked, he says.
“She wasn’t afraid of being who she wanted to be,” Sterling says. “Dad was king of his castle, and he let her run the show.”
Sterling and his siblings’ childhood were filled with art, and Pam painted murals on their bedroom walls, including one of a cow jumping over the moon in his bedroom.
One time, for show and tell, Sterling cut a portion of his bedroom curtains – Pam had studded them with stars – to bring in to class, an event his parents have not forgotten.
“I still hear about that,” Sterling says.
Bounds-Seemans is unsure how much art she produces. Some of it is commissioned.
She’s done several for Patty Daniels, including an engagement portrait requested by Daniels’ husband, Michael. It included the picture of old car, a Plymouth Duster, he was redoing, a picture of them, and things, including matchbox cars.
She also did one for Daniels with a Halloween theme, Daniels’ favorite holiday.
“She put me in there dressed up as Elvira,” she says. “She even did a box for me, and put me on there as a kitten with a whip.”
It went with Daniels’ leopard-themed bathroom.
And the art includes jewels, lots of encrusted jewels.
“Everything she does has to have jewels,” Daniels says. “And glitter and bright colors.”
Like her artwork and her attire, Bounds-Seemans’ home is soaked in color and reeks of art, from a paint-encrusted work table, dozens of colored boards, and a living room filled with a menagerie of American, African and European art, knick-knacks, pottery and figures.
“Delaware is so traditional,” said Bartholomaus. “I show contemporary work, and Pam transcends that. Even staid and conservative people are drawn to her work.
“It’s an element of – I don’t know – comfort.”