Arts & Culture By Joan Tapper Photographs by Gary Moss
Abstract Expressions
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A Santa Ynez Valley vineyard provides more than just a beautiful backdrop for Seyburn Zorthian’s artistic journey.
n wine terminology, “terroir” refers to the environment in which grapevines grow, a combination of factors including soil, topography, climate, and other elements that also impart a wine’s characteristics. Similarly, creative works are shaped by the people and places that have surrounded an artist. Seyburn Zorthian, for example, remembers how, as a girl, she would sit in the Altadena studio of her father, classically trained, Armenian-born painter Jirayr Zorthian, and look through his art magazines. “Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Joan Miró, those were among my favorites,” she says. Their images set her on the career path that led to the bold and colorful pieces she paints in her studio in the Santa Ynez Valley. The location of that studio—a renovated hayloft of a barn on
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the grounds of Buttonwood Winery & Vineyard—reveals another aspect of Seyburn’s story. Her mother, Betty Williams, bought the then-equestrian property in 1968. At that time, Seyburn was an art student at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia and visited frequently, pitching in with ranch duties like caring for the quarter horses in residence. After Seyburn graduated, she gravitated to the valley and stayed on, working as an artist. Meanwhile, Buttonwood was evolving under Williams’ forward-looking approach: She conditioned and trained > Artist Seyburn Zorthian (bottom, left) stands among the tools of her trade in her studio at Buttonwood Winery & Vineyard. To create her works, such as (clockwise from top, left) Cycles of Innocence, Protected Place, and Fabric of Light, she integrates Asian calligraphy techniques with her American sensibilities.