The most basic disjunction in Nathan DiPietro’s new series of egg-tempera-on-panel paintings is right on the surface: The paintings are dry. (This is an effect of the tempera.) Their surfaces have zero shine, bury all memory of moisture. But they depict the rainy town of Seabrook, Washington: its edges of ocean, its curving creeks, its chubby clouds, its canopies of mist, its proximity to the rain forest of the Olympic National Park. This place is real—or, well, it’s hard to say what this place is, but it does exist. Seabrook, Washington, is an entirely new, old-fashioned “historic” beach “town.”
Seabrook is a dream that began years ago during childhood beach vacations in the Pacific Northwest. Inspired by those memories, and firmly rooted in the architectural traditions of a bygone era, we are creating an authentic beach village to nestle within the spectacular natural beauty of the Olympic Peninsula. It will itself grow even more beautiful with time.
The emphasis is not mine; that’s the way the text appears on Seabrook Land Company’s website, created in 2010, on the page with the words “Art of Townmaking” written in a baby-blue cursive font across the top. A photograph on the page depicts a young, white grandmother seated on an immaculate, sunny sidewalk with her two young granddaughters, smiling down at them as they examine something unseen. An adult bicycle sits in the background; a child’s bicycle helmet, pink, sits in the foreground. Stretching away from the people are the white columns of nice houses set close to each other (the photograph is “firmly rooted in the architectural traditions of a bygone era”). You might easily think Seabrook is a town of its own, but when you Google it, you find that its address is in the existing town of Pacific Beach. It is a residential development calling itself a town, like many residential developments have begun to do.
Another segment of the website, “History,” reads, “Haven’t been to this area? That might just be by design. In the early 1900’s, the neighboring towns of Pacific Beach & Moclips were beach hot spots with masses of people traveling mostly by rail to this farthest west terminus. After making Pacific Beach its home during World War II, the US Navy and Air Force intentionally took the area ‘off the map.’ Today, with Seabrook re-introducing so many people to this beautiful area, history is indeed repeating itself.”
Again, emphasis not mine. The brain strains to consider how “history is repeating itself” by the creation of a new town that isn’t a town but calls its own town its “neighboring town,” and how humans force stories onto (and off of) supposed maps. This jumble of brain activity finds its complement in DiPietro’s series of paintings called New Northwest Coast: An Investigation of Seabrook Washington. The title makes reference to “Northwest Coast” art, which usually means art made in native traditions, and forensics (“investigation”). Seabrook is indeed a neo-past-ist situation crying out for investigation, and DiPietro’s paintings are documents of open-ended curiosity, a dusty-dry archive of estrangement.
DiPietro came to Seattle after graduating with a painting degree from Central Washington University in 2003, and he’s shown his landscapes at PUNCH Gallery—slightly claustrophobic, neo-suburban paintings immediately revealing a kinship with American “regionalists” (usually Midwesterners) of the early 20th century, whose heroes are artists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood.
Like Benton or Wood, DiPietro depicts highly designed swaths of land, places where solid, curving shapes decorated with bright patterns and colors curl tightly around each other. The attractive exaggerations of the 1930s artists were a way to dramatize their rural environs in the larger context of an increasingly (and, to them, frustratingly) urban American art world. Cities still dominate art today, and while DiPietro lives in one, he positions his paintings in exurban places: Palouse, say, or Seabrook, where he stayed in a cottage for a week, shot photographs, and came back to his studio in Seattle to make the paintings.
In past works, DiPietro has employed a circular composition style popular in the Italian Renaissance, which feels more playful (sometimes distractingly so). But in Seabrook, the paintings are all rational-rectangular, which calls to mind not the history of painting, but photography and drawing. What come to mind are large-format photographs by Northwest artists like Eirik Johnson (Sawdust Mountain) or Adam Satushek, or the postapocalyptic drawings of Houston artist Robyn O’Neil. Like DiPietro, those artists capture eerie or outrageous scenes (a giant house on a platform for sale in a boat parking lot next to Interstate 5, for instance, by Satushek) in total deadpan and markedly un-telling detail.
The idyllic shapeliness DiPietro borrows from American regionalist painting has the same aura of nostalgia the real-estate developers are trying to create. But the scenery reveals Seabrook to be a surreal chop shop. Trees are hoisted up and hovering in mid-air, caught in an ugly state between past roots and future use. In Historic Cabin, two matching men throw a baseball. Its curve compositionally ties together new mega-cottages on each end and a tiny “historic” log cabin in the middle. The “historic” cabin is set behind a wire, not picket, fence, and appears to be empty save for a cyclops eye of light glaring out from its windowed door. The sky is about to open up into rain, and the ocean stretches away behind the houses indifferently.
DiPietro perverts scale—or does he? What is incredibly unlikely in appearance may be perfectly factual. In the painting Seabrook After Arbor Day, an old-growth stump is bigger than the whole houses it stands next to. But another, giant house in their midst makes nonsense of everything around it. The edges of the image are blurred, as if it were based on a snapshot. In this place, who knows what’s documentary and what’s pure invention?
Off in the dark corners of another, newer painting, Stream Rehabilitation, stars in the night sky sparkle as in a Disney fantasy, but beneath them hunch the dark bureaucratic visions of corporate park buildings set in hills of trees. This is not Seabrook, it’s closer to Seattle: the Issaquah Highlands rising above I-90. These paintings are full of details, but the details don’t draw you in, they pull your eye around the surface and then push you back out, playing with flatness. Flat and dry: two words never associated with the Pacific Northwest of the United States. The truths and lies are all buried together in these rehabbing hills. 
As someone who’s seen the Issaquah Highlands and felt sensations ranging from vague uneasiness to premonitions of outright terror, this type of ambivalent representation is long overdue. Who in this city cares about the environment of the Pac NW other than hysterical environmentalists? It’s easy to get so wrapped up in single issues, micro cultures and their respective politics that we forget how quickly the grandeur around us is, not vanishing, exactly, but morphing into a shadow of itself. In an effort to remember what makes our very unique area unique, we construct caricatures that distort our understanding of the history of this place. I think it’s tragic, and therefore kind of comical, that the wildness of our environment is sold back to us piece-by-piece as a second-rate experience of the real location (Disney World is the perfect analogue and prototype). There’s an obvious socioeconomic factor here as well. Much like the mostly-privatized shores of our lakes (ever walked or rode the Burke-Gilman north of Seattle?) these areas could be rendered all but inaccessible to anyone other than the highest of the high earners once they’ve finally been ‘captured’ by their greatest admirers–the developers. I’ll never know how the 1st Peoples felt as they watched their numbers dwindle and their land devoured, but I’m beginning to understand how the 2nd and 3rd peoples feel as the 4th and 5th waves start to make their grabs. And that’s the thing about waves: they just keep rolling in. Nice piece.
Yeah, FSM forbid that someone builds beach houses that aren’t the tacky shit-holes of Open Sores. Sorry, I mean Ocean Shores. I can’t afford a house in Seabrook, but 8 or 9 friends and I can rent one for about $30-$40 each, per night. It’s quiet, the beach is a short walk away, it’s relaxing. Why is it that the Stranger’s writers all feel that you should be able to do anything you want, be “who you are”, not be oppressed by other people ideas. AS LONG AS IT FITS IN WITH THEIR “CAP-HILL, GEORGETOWN, I’M HIP AND IRONIC BECAUSE I DRINK PBR” B.S. (emphasis mine). The usual Too Cool For School drivel. And these painting aren’t some grand social contribution that the article makes them out to be. They are being sold to a inner-city hipster population that needs to feel superior to someone, anyone. And ironic, they always need to feel ironic.
I’m a big fan of Jen’s writing, and a bigger fan of Seabrook. It’s not a place that was made with me in mind, at least not yet. But it is permanent, and so thank god it is at least a place. There is nothing dishonest about using classical architectural elements today.
My family has gone to Moclips, just north of Seabrook, every summer for the past 20 years. The area in which it was built is essentially a clearcut in the coastal forest. It is a bit jarring to someone who lives in a 100 year-old apartment building in a neighborhood that has been evolving for much longer than that to see this “town” pop up in what is essentially the middle of nowhere. I think these paintings capture the strangeness that I feel about the development. That said, just because I feel this way, does not mean that I pass any judgement on to those who have bought or rented houses there, regardless of how I find the motivations and the marketing behind the development to be problematic.
Keep in mind that Grays Harbor County, where “Seabrook” is located, has a 14% unemployment rate. These developments, ugly and environmentally destructive as they are, create jobs.
@Joe Glibmoron: Ugly is a personal opinion. Not everything is an ultramodern house. I grew up going to old beach towns on the east coast. I like that architecture. What is it “supposed” to look like in your view? As for “environmentally destructive” you need to back that one up with facts. Also since when is there a moratorium on building anything new? That’s just silly. Instead of starting with 5 to 10 acre lots and then sub-dividing until a town exists, they went straight to high density housing, pretty environmentally friendly and what everyone in the city is preaching. And @boxofbirds, better that we should have 100 years of ‘evolving’ to get to a working model? That area was clearcut but it was probably a 100 years ago or more. It’s disingenuous of this article and the painter to imply that they are cutting down huge old grown forest to build these homes. They are not. The people living in the city who look down on all of this are most likely walking on floors and living in buildings that were built from that clearcut many years ago, just for perspective. This is all second growth. They have kept the giant stumps that were left behind in the original clearcut. They have purposely built mostly across the highway from the beach, not on the actual coast. Why is it OK to go stay in a brand new motel in Ocean Shores but not in a new house north of there? Really, someone explain to me why it is wrong to build a town from the ground up? Don’t like it? Don’t go there.
I saw this place for the first time yesterday. It is a bit creepy and strange. The places are nice enough, if you are in say, Cape Cod. The notion of a New England style beach “town” is weird on highway 109.
There are huge piles of ground up fir trees on the newly barren swaths of land where more ill-fitting houses will go.
If you are going to mow down a bunch of trees indiscriminately then at least erect structures that fit. Now there are little lawns, English gardens and puny deciduous trees on the tiny little yards. It is entirely fake looking. I suppose it is relaxing in a sleeping pill induced haze sort of way.
Also the single paned windows and the paint on some of these places clearly aren’t standing up to the PNW coastal weather.
It clearly is meant to appeal to a certain economic class comprised of people who don’t have to think about much.
Wow lauramae, what exactly “fits” in your mind for structures? Should they put in a bunch o’ double-wides? I’m sure they will stand up to your vicious “PNW weather”. Many of the houses are modeled after old houses from Oregon coastal towns. Why would that be weird in WA? Is Open Sores more to your liking? Then go there instead of Seabrook. You can have all the shitty split-level 80’s homes you can handle, and lots of fast food places, and cinderblock motels. Ocean Shores is obviously meant to appeal to a certain economic class comprised of people who don’t want think about what kind of town they build, ’cause gettin’ plastered on PBR is hip dude, gimme another bong hit!!! Glad to know you’ll be keeping your over-inflated view of yourself down there.
As for the tiny yards and small trees, The yards are small because it’s a town designed around the idea of being able to walk everywhere (the market, the beach, the park, etc.) in about 5 minutes. The average person can’t afford to buy a piece of land on the coast and build a house, even a small one. You could go stay in some crappy hotel in Ocean Shores or you can spend the same amount stay in a cabin or house in Seabrook. Of course if you feel the need to go to some overpriced tourist bar for crappy food and dirty beer taps, you are out of luck. But if you aren’t so stuck up that you can actually enjoy sitting around a fire-pit in the park with friends or relaxing on the porch with a beer and a good book, then Seabrook is pretty good. The houses are build to very high standards, with double pane windows, huge kitchens, and intelligently laid out floor plans. Single pane windows are only on enclosed porches. I know this because I’ve actually stayed at some of them. In fact my partner and I, and 10 friends have rented a house for 4 days this weekend for my partner’s birthday. Cost per person for 4 days/3 nights – $165 each. $55/night, spend that in Open Sores and I hope you don’t get bedbugs.
And all of the “fake looking” landscaping is done with native plants, maybe that’s why it looks fake to you. Or maybe it’s the giant chip you’re carrying around on your shoulder.