Space cats and flying pigs: The eccentric strength of Del Seaman’s Artistic Hand 

Del Seaman clung to the side of a bent-over skyscraper, following a cat toward the horizon when a hand reached out to him and started rubbing his arm. Then came the voice of his son, Tyson, pleading with him. 

“Dad, it’s time to wake up. Dad…” 

It had been 21 days since the coma began. It had all come in a rush. A friend found him looking “green with yellow eyes,” he said. An ambulance was called. Doctors performed emergency surgery on his gall bladder, but the damage had already been severe.

At day 21, doctors had just told Seaman’s family to get ready for him to go into a care facility, the kind of home most people don’t come back from, at least not the way their family had hoped. 

They were told what was next: Find a way to make the money work. Fight with insurance. Sign the papers. Then they watch their dad, forever asleep, as he’s rolled on a gurney into an ambulance. Maybe they hold his hand one more time before the doors close. 

“They say at 21 days, that’s when you get the trach tube put in,” Seaman said. “So those were the choices: Either I was going to be on a trach tube, or dead.” 

In the coma, there was no life flashing before his eyes, he said, no memories of racing for a swimming scholarship at FSU, or of anti-war protests in Tallahassee in the ‘60s, or of running from the police, nor of the marriage to his first wife, Elaine, during the summer of love, no raising kids, no founding an art studio with his second wife, Barbara. Just the same odd dream, over and over, of being on a jagged black building that’s leaned over and stretching west, with his cat, who had been dead for years, beckoning him forward to the spire.  

Then Seaman, the septuagenarian owner of The Artistic Hand in Oviedo, felt something touch his arm. Then he heard that voice calling through the darkness. Then, as suddenly as he fell asleep, he woke up. 

“Dad, you’re back,” his son said. 

“Back from where?” Seaman replied. 

Gaining strength

That was nearly two years ago. Today it’s April Fools’ day. The peculiar sound emanating through the doorway of the dimly lit back bedroom of Seaman’s century-old home was first a hiss that seemed to draw out, then in, but stepping across the threshold it transforms into Darth Vader. Seaman, an incongruous visage of gold wire-rim spectacles, a trimmed but full white mustache and permanently pushed-back hippie rocker hair slowly vanishing in a gray temporal haze looks up with a bemusedly distant gaze from an overpadded brown leather recliner that’s pushed too close to the wall to recline. 

Surrounded by abstract Daliesque art and Pearl Jam posters, a TV aglow on a dresser, he’s been sitting here for a while this Tuesday morning, recharging. His caretaker, Meredith, flutters silently in and out of the room like a bird, checking in on him every now and then. A glazed terra cotta cat rests on a sculpted clay bed above his dresser across the room, quietly sleeping as Seaman regains strength from an oxygen machine, hohhh-purrr, hohhh-purrr, before venturing out past the kitchen, past shelves of artfully glazed unregarded tchotchkes entombed by the law of inertia, beyond a squeaky swinging door marked “Private residence, no entry,” and into the street-facing rooms that form the gallery of the Oviedo art studio The Artistic Hand. 

He’s always ready for a few minute chat. Or maybe an hour.

Within seconds of affably outstretching his still-firm right hand, he sends the room spinning with tales that span the globe, outer space, and thousands of years, evidence of a man who’s seemingly rooted here but whose mind ventures forever restlessly beyond this place. Sometimes that comes out in stories. Sometimes those stories become works of art on a wall. 

An eccentric cultural nexus

Up front in the gallery, Cyndi Rilea, in a graying blonde boyishly Beatlesque haircut and a tie-dyed Artistic Hand T-shirt, picks through one of the gallery’s four rooms of wall-to-wall glazed clay art, narrating as she goes. 

Passing by shelves of sculpted Mayan ruins in miniature, then a handful of mugs featuring cats or spaceships or dinosaurs or flying pigs or cats in spaceships abducting dinosaurs past flying pigs, she lifts up a bowl, finds a hidden scene, sculpted and glazed, hides underneath. “Wow!” she exclaims. “He did the bottom!” 

“Every time I walk through here I find something I haven’t seen before,” she said, having already worked here for more than three years. 

“It’s whimsy. It’s fun. And when you see it, you say ‘OK, yeah, that’s Del.’” 

More than 400 artists have been represented in this gallery, Rilea said, from all over the country, including countless works by Seaman. One pass around the first room and “eclectic” begins to seem like an understatement. 

Rilea lifts up an aqua colored, hand-sized glazed clay plate with what looks like an archeological specimen embedded in it. On closer inspection, it’s an actual skeleton. 

“The call is out: Whenever you find a petrified lizard or frog, you’re supposed to bring it in to Del and then he glazes it into a dish,” she said.  

Within a few feet in the gallery’s front room, Peruvian artifacts give way to chorus-line chickens, a nod to Oviedo’s most famous residents. 

A suburban Shire

But the heart of this place isn’t the gallery, Seaman said, even if it’s the only thing many people see. Outside, circumnavigating a clockwise course around the horticulturally dissociative yard, past pink plastic flamingoes slowly being subducted by the earth, dominatingly enormous ancient live oaks soften and cool the rays of a scorching sun, and there’s a buzz in the distance. It’s just past the graveyard. 

“This is where our kilns go to die,” said Sarah Roberts, taking a break from working in the gallery to act as a tour guide for a few minutes.

Passing through into the backyard beyond a schizophrenically muralized wood fence gives way to the disorienting scene change of half a dozen cylindrical, squatty old defunct clay-firing kilns that seem to float in an undulating sea of windblown overgrown ferns and vertical kelp-like ginger stalks. 

Turn your head to the right and the Artistic Hand’s rustic studio sprawls a labyrinthine complex of kiln rooms, classrooms, a weathered pump house and storage rooms comprising a spartan, overgrown workshop that seems to have expanded over and over again in about 10 stages. From the outside it appears as a rectilinear Shire shanty of time immemorial, congruous with its ancient overgrown surroundings, a beckoning home in the forest. 

The doors, when one can find them, are scattered and slapdash, seeming to fill informal roles, mostly deployed to keep dust off glaze, but the hinges may be the most worn parts in the entire complex. The doors move constantly, swung by potters, teachers and students in perpetual motion between rooms. 

“It’s alive in here,” Seaman said. 

Beneath a fluorescent glow, the building moves and breathes like a lit beehive. The “bees,” all ages, flit in and out of the many rooms and alcoves, then in and out of the studio. Sometimes a “bee” goes on a journey that meanders around the outside of the building before reentering through another door, usually carrying something clay. For those moments they move more gingerly than usual, burdened by the weighty yet delicate things in their hands. 

“We save people here”

Surrounded by suburban sprawl stretching outward from the central hub of old Oviedo, The Hand takes on a different feeling than the ever-quickening pace of cars blasting past on Central Boulevard. Crossing the threshold, time seems to slow, the temperature seems to drop.

“We’re like an island out here,” Seaman said. It’s a deceptively cool Thursday April morning now and he’s another man entirely, the center of a buzz of studio activity, leaning forward in a wood-and-canvas high-rise director’s chair as he arches over the end of a table, putting the finishing touches on another bizarrist post apocalyptic clay whimsy in which it’s still uncertain whether the pigs, space cats or dinosaurs have won. 

“That’s Mayan, the cat. He’s my spirit animal,” Seaman says, pointing at a little detail that carries with it an impossibly intricate backstory that goes on for five minutes, then he leans in and adds with an implied wink, “He’s in cahoots with the Townhouse Chicken.”

Creating is fun but that’s not all of the reason people are here, Seaman said. People can do art anywhere. 

“There’s a lot of students that have home studios and still come here,” Rilea said. “The camaraderie is priceless.” 

Later in the afternoon, Kim Sager, in a short, sandy disheveled bob of hair, gold-rimmed glasses and a tank top, pulls newly fired white ceramic from her own shiny, red metal Skutt kiln. She’s in the far corner of the Hand’s farthest-flung outdoor room as Florida plays a cruel trick of an already burgeoning summer, but she’s not sweating. A product designer by trade, she used to work for Sesame Workshop, then Apple, then Disney and then Nickelodeon. What she’s pulling out of a kiln today she’ll glaze in a kaleidoscope of color before it’s destined for Koko Kakigori Shaved Ice in Thornton Park. She’s pulling out enough ceramics from that kiln that it could be mistaken for an industrial operation. But this isn’t a career for her. She comes here for other reasons.  

“This is a very unusual place … this is more of a family,” she said. “People feel very connected to Del here. Really it’s the family, camaraderie, but it’s also very much where we are.” 

A few feet away Chris Jaskulski works over a two-tone optical illusion of clay that nearly looks like wood, gradually staining his own bright orange shirt darker with clay in the process. He’s bounced from the new-home-construction industry to being a chef and restaurateur to new-home construction again, and said his kids have been coming to classes here for more than half their lives. 

“They come back home covered in clay, with smiles on their faces, and they make things that I never thought they could make,” he said.

But for Jaskulski, it was work stress that brought him here. 

“Throwing on the wheel, it’s very zen,” he said. “It’s kind of a cliche, but when you’re throwing on the wheel, your brain turns off and it’s nothing but the physics of the clay in your hand. It’s very singularly focused. It shuts off all the voices, all the chatter of what I’m going to do later, ‘Did I send that email?’ and all that stuff.” 

That might be more the point, Seaman said.

“There’s other art endeavours,” Seaman said. “Painting a wine glass, that’s fun, that’s art. Painting a piece of pottery, that’s fun. Make a Christmas ornament… But what we do here is more than just object-oriented. It’s more human-oriented. It’s for human beings to express themselves, feel like they’re part of a group, a family.”

Many roads leading to home

Muffled thunder on a long-since-dark rainy Thursday night in May reverberates through the old pine roof of the “throwing room,” filled with occasionally spinning clay-sculpting wheels. A small handful of students aged 20 through 80 mill about, sit, spin clay, mold, stand and disappear. Teacher Julie Harbers gives an impromptu specialized lesson to a pair of them. Next to them reposes a thin wraith of clay dust on a table. 

A few feet away, around a corner, another room fills with five conversations at once. Beneath a distant patter of rain, more than a dozen sculptors work over three high-top tables, each the size of a small car. Julia Wolf-Crawley has sung opera in the cavernous crimson concert hall of Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center, but for tonight’s performance, with a brush the width of a toothpick, she paints intricate details onto a tiny anthropomorphic cat’s face. The cat is the driver, she says, of the gray and pink hand-sized clay Mini Cooper convertible on the table in front of her. She sculpted that too, over the course of weeks, in between cinematically witty exchanges with her tablemates. 

She’d almost given up on it, she said. It was her first try. But now it’s the envy of the others at her table. 

She trades whip-smart ironic humor across the table with Rachel Behm, easily two decades her junior, in a floral apron and with eyes that smile in ways her mouth jests too quickly to pause for. Behm is fretting over color choices on a friendly newborn-kitten-sized clay dragon, nowhere near finished but already named Clive, before she makes a snap decision. In 30 seconds the brushwork is already done, just a shade off sky blue, maybe to help it to be invisible in the air. 

“I have to do this quickly or I’ll get bored and give up,” she said, self-proclaiming she’s too wary of her ADHD to give herself time to stop. 

Around the corner in the clay throwing room, Cindy Henderson, silver-haired and relaxed yet neatly dressed, says she moved every two years when she was a kid, before first meeting Del, when she was at Colonial High School, in 1976. She bounced between teaching and creating sculptures and clay at Walt Disney World’s now long-gone Buena Vista Village, among blacksmiths and silversmiths, for more than a decade.

But then “they squeezed all the artists out,” Henderson said. No more sculpting. She needed somewhere to go. 

She remembered Seaman, and remembered his comfortable, accommodating teaching style. 

“Every time I’ve come back to clay, it’s been because of trauma,” Henderson said. “I needed healing. And that’s why I came here.” 

She’s been teaching here ever since, in a studio that seems to magnetize teachers.

“I was a teacher as well, but not an art teacher, and when I stopped teaching this was where I was,” Roberts said. “I needed therapy when I was teaching during Covid, so clay, that’s my therapy, the only therapy I got. That’s how I ended up here.”

“Some people we save,” Seaman said. “Some people are going through a time of their life, a crisis, they’ve lost something, they’ve lost a loved one, and they can come here and we can put them back together, and over time make them whole.”

Time to live another life

At one point, it was the Artistic Hand’s founders, Del Seaman and Barbara Walker Seaman, who needed saving. They used to be cityfolk, in Winter Park, before escaping into “the wilderness” to the east.

“Oh, that’s a story,” he says. 

It was the 1980s. 

“We wanted to live in the country,” Seaman said. Too many negatives of city life in Winter Park had encroached upon their lives, he said. “We just wanted to live a different life.” 

“One night we had looked at property way, way east of [Oviedo],” he said. “It was 7 acres, it was an island, and you had to get to it with a bridge.”

They were nearly sold on it. On the drive back to Oviedo’s quiet old downtown in their ‘70s-era Dodge cargo van, big enough to carry an art show weekend inside, big enough to carry a baker’s half dozen of a family on a rug in the back, they rolled toward the intersection of Broadway and Central as the sun sank ahead.

“Usually at 5 o’clock the city was all buttoned up and the stoplight was going blink blink blink,” Seaman said. 

But he saw the lights on at Meat World, in a dusty clay parking lot, and on a flatbed trailer from Nelson and Company was Nelson Young and the Sandy Valley Boys playing into the evening air. There were some people in lawn chairs in front. Seaman and family pulled up and opened the side doors of the van, and the bluegrass flowed in. 

“The guy next to us says ‘Y’all want a beer?’…and a guy came from the right side, had a beard, said, ‘We have great schools here and we don’t have enough kids in ‘em. We really need you’ and we said we’re artists and he said ‘Oh! Artists! We’ve always liked artists.’ So we went home, and said ‘This is where we’re going to move.’” 

So they moved onto that island east of Oviedo, and eventually, a few years later, they moved closer to downtown, where the Hand is now. They began building a life that started as a commercial pottery studio, albeit one with clients nationwide, that transformed into an artistic collective centered on their family. 

As he tells the story, Seaman sits staring through three plaster walls and one wooden one toward a friend’s old white wood-sided house across Central Avenue. Squint hard enough that your vision travels back in time half a century and you’ll see him and Barbara joining hands and their names together there. She’s in a black kimono-style top with a black patterned skirt, he’s in jeans and a borrowed brown corduroy jacket. The wedding bouquet was flowers that had been thrown out at the end of the day by the florist down the street, gathered up for the wedding by friends. 

He had met his Barbara at the Cady Way pool in the 1970s. It didn’t take him long to know she was the one.

“In five minutes I was madly in love,” Seaman said.  

Goodbye Granny B

From 1990 to 2008 the couple turned the old building into a teaching studio, centered on classes but also selling art through the gallery. Barbara kept winning awards for her art. They tried to keep up with the art show circuit. The studio kept growing. But then, in February of 2008, just a few weeks after her 63rd birthday, battling health problems, Barbara died one night from congestive heart failure, somewhere during the rush to the hospital.

Del lost his partner, known lovingly as “Granny B” to her grandchildren, leaving the future in doubt for The Hand. 

In a dimly sunlit back room, right next to the door leading out to the studio, there’s a photo leaning against the wall of the pair together, thousands of miles from home, on a high ridge with the overgrown “lost city of the Incas,” Machu Picchu, descending behind them, his hand around her shoulder. 

“She’s everywhere now,” he said. 

Her death cast the studio into chaos for weeks, Seaman said, as a small group of teachers and staff tried to reorganize the studio minus its central figure. Kelly Moore, a UCF student turned professional artist, took over. 

“She ran all the businesses, all the art school,” Seaman said. “She let me get better.”

Over the years the cast gradually changed, including a small army of teachers, though some, like Henderson, have been here the entire time.

On a calm, nearly deserted Friday morning in the back studio, Shelby Wren, one of the youngest teachers and the studio manager, quietly picks up pieces of clay in the outside clay firing room. Up front in the gallery, Kathryn Jory, affable but businesslike in rolled-up, flannel-print long-sleeves, pivots rapidly between tasks at the front desk, managing accounts and spreadsheets and more that Seaman said he can’t do anymore. 

“I would not be here if it wasn’t for Kathryn,” Seaman said. “I was in a situation where I was doing registration, I was trying to put out a newsletter, I was teaching in class, I was running the gallery, I was ordering supplies and going to get some of the supplies, and I got to the point where I just couldn’t keep up with it. I was falling behind and making mistakes. Kathryn came to help me for a little while. She’s been here ever since.” 

More pitched in over the decade and a half since Barbara’s passing. In 2014, in the wake of one of only three firings Seaman said he’s ever carried out, Harbers, who so frequently gives classes under a summer evening veil of rain, became one of his key teachers, among a small army of them. 

“There are so many changes that have happened since my arrival,” Harbers said. “Right now I feel like we have such a great crew and staff. These people, they do it because they love it. Everybody’s just trying to work together. It’s a bunch of friends just trying to keep a place going. That’s really why I like being here now.” 

In his bedroom Seaman is readying for what’s looking to be a busy Friday morning and he’s armed with another pair of eccentric socks, which, it turns out, come from a drawer full of mostly two kinds of socks: The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine,” and Oviedo chickens. He starts introducing all the pairs in the drawer. Just then, a Beatles song dances out of the speakers on the TV and takes Seaman back to the moment he heard them for the first time. “My mother thought they were cute,” he said. But sometimes it’s more than just a trip back in time. There’s a song he says that, whenever he hears it, brings Barbara back to him. The name comes with no hesitation at all. 

“Just Breathe,” he says, and starts dictating the Pearl Jam song request to his cellphone. But it’s garbled on its way between an unsteady voice and the digital cloud, where it floats past like a lost balloon. Eventually he succeeds, presses play, holds the airily interwoven acoustic guitar melody close to his ear, and reverie hits him like a drug. 

His head tilts back just before Eddie Vedder mourns, “Yes I understand that every life must end, uh huh. As we sit alone I know someday we must go, uh huh.” Then Seaman’s eyes, set skyward, draw closed. He’s gone off into the music for a little while, and she’s there with him, as Vedder’s pleading rasp implores in a drawn-out withered wail, “Stay with me.” 

A few verses later the song fades to nothing, and Seaman is left with that dim glow, silence, and a doorway in front of him.

Space dust

In the studio, Seaman sees energy everywhere, and that keeps him going. He loves teaching, loves being around that buzz of activity.

He says he wants to be a part of that energy until the moment he leaves, whenever that is. He makes it clear he doesn’t want to walk or be wheeled out of here in a chair; he wants to depart everything all at once. 

But he has a plan for when he does. On his dresser in the corner of the bedroom, lit by that dim light, he gestures toward the fired terra cotta cat resting on the sculpted clay bed, with Tom Petty lyrics carved into the front of it. Inside it’s half hollow, and half filled with ashes.  

“That’s ‘Mayan,’ the cat,” Seaman said. “He’s in there. Barbara’s in there too.” 

The elaborately sculpted urn seems like a good resting place for him. Or maybe just a part of him. The other part, he muses, could be somewhere else. 

“There’s enough ashes for the glaze; they can put it all over the place. They can make little tiles and put it out there and stamp my name on it.” 

He thinks through how people might talk about it, about him. 

“Del’s on that tile.” 

“Well I see Del’s name on there.” 

His expression lightens almost imperceptibly, challenging you to divine his intentions. 

“‘No, the glaze is Del.’” 

Maybe he’ll be a vase, he says. Or maybe half a dozen of them. 

“I like the idea of one of my kids thinking of me and saying to their kids ‘Let’s go put some flowers in Grandad,’” he said.  

The last thing he wants, he says, is for anybody fighting over what’s left after he’s gone. 

“So many people waste so much time. Families fight over this every day … it is what it is,” Seaman said. “If you waste a little bit of time worrying about it, you’ve taken that time from your creativity and enjoying the day. What are we here for? To enjoy the day, to enjoy planet Earth … We’re on this ball of rock that’s over 17,000 miles an hour flying through space.”

Life was here before him, and it will be here after him, he says. And throughout that time, just like with his current circumstances, there’s been adaptation. 

“Nothing in my life is going to disturb me,” Seaman says. “I know I’m a wreck, I bleed all the time. I have these big bruises. I don’t care. I just don’t care. I’m happy, I’m alive. These old people, they see these things that are not working, not functional, and they dwell on it. I’m alive. Being alive outshines everything.” 

May 9, a Friday morning, he had a cardiac catheterization a couple weeks back. Tomorrow, the art market comes back to the front yard of The Hand. And he’s excited for the moment he grabs his smaller ventilator, “Oxygen Junior,” or “OJ” for short, gets up, walks out the front door, down a meandering path through the ferns, into a seat in the shade with friends. Music will flow from a small stage, artists will show off their creations, and maybe a few new faces will say hi.

“This is the first one that I’ve been to here,” he said. “All the others, I’ve been in the hospital. I’ll just stay there, enjoy it and talk to people.” 

He’s just finished telling a story about a doctor asking him if he has a hobby to stave off dementia, which Seaman found comical, when the phone rings. It’s a telemarketer. Seaman at first could be mistaken for a prattling old man, bewildered and gathering himself, but then his eyes light up. “You have a lovely voice. Are you in another country? Is there an option where you can call me every day or two? I could talk to you quite a while. If you email me your address, I’ll send you a T-shirt and a ceramic mug as a reward.” 

The telemarketer eventually hangs up, but it takes nearly five minutes. 

“Wow, that was a record,” Seaman says, deadpan as always.  

But the talking was a bit much. He switches the big machine on again, and Darth Vader returns. Fittingly, his newest Pearl Jam shirt is black again today, worn as another banner of defiance. Seaman seems intent on rocking on. 

Grabbing life by the wheel

His philosophy doesn’t seem to be written down anywhere. He’s more keen to muse on time as if he were just along for the ride. If things happen, they happen.

“Somebody said to me, ‘What is your religion?’ I said, ‘All life is on the cosmic wheel. It’s the turning of all life,’” Seaman said.

The irony of that statement on a Wednesday afternoon in mid-June is Seaman’s missing minivan in the parking lot of The Hand that had been a fixture for years. The one with the mildly psychedelic Pearl Jam stickers on it. His terrestrial wheels are gone.

He just gave it away to an artist friend’s wife.

“I’ll never drive again,” he says. But in the same statement, he says “Everything is very positive.”

He’s having Meredith change gears a little today. The gigantic tree with a trunk 10 feet in circumference slowly spreading into the path behind the house had its undergrowth so overgrown that it hid all the gnomes and other garden decorations. She tore those out and put in some mulch, brightening up the walk to the studio. He’s talking about having friends of The Hand bring in even more plants to add more color. 

His back bedroom, his recharging room, is much brighter today. The blinds, perennially shut, are all open. He says it’s the first time in a decade that’s happened. This time he talks, ranging from archaeology to gardening to ghosts for more than an hour straight without oxygen, but walking’s a different story. He’s getting ready for a heart procedure to fix a valve. His recovery has ebbed and flowed like a wave. It had bottomed out for a couple of weeks, but now he feels like it’s on an upswing. He’s trying to take it easy, but he knows he has to get stronger.

“All I want to do is go out and be in class. I was on a roll out there. When my breathing got really bad, I couldn’t go farther than the length of my oxygen cord. I’m trying to build up so I’ve got longer time.”

He’s planning how he’ll get back out there. He’s been building up how far he can walk, strategizing about where to put OJ in case he needs a break, an Olympic montage in slow motion.

“My students are waiting for me,” he says.

There’s a class tomorrow morning coming in. A big maybe, he thinks. Still he grants himself the joy of musing one day into the distance, of switching off the machine, levering himself up again, cane under hand, and walking out determinedly into that morning glow cascading through the trees, the faded red studio door beckoning just beyond. 

Words and photos by Isaac Benjamin Babcock