Modern Artist Dick Seeger Pioneered Scottsdale; Now He Turns to His Own Backyard

Seeger's small but vocal cult following mentions him frequently in blogs, and hefty price tags are attached to the now-collectible pieces of Seeger sculpture and furniture that pop up online.

Perhaps even more telling is the recirculation of Seeger "thoughts," quoted by a new, metaphysically ravenous generation of truth-seekers. Utterings like "To be average scares the hell out of me" and "His search for answers was so involved, his mind turned into a question mark" are quoted on Facebook and personal blogs, a testament to Seeger's philosophical staying power.

Jamie Peachey

A beast-headed man greets visitors to Seeger's great room.

Jamie Peachey

Assorted oddities hang from the ceiling of the "ethnic room."

Details

Take a tour: of Dick Seeger's home in this slide show.

Related Content

• Paolo Soleri Is the True Legend of the Arizona Architecture Scene
  May 30, 2013
• Shine: Art in Scottsdale
  November 8, 2012
• FnB's Charleen Badman Tells Food & Wine Her Favorite Places to Eat, Shop, & Sleep in the Valley
  January 17, 2013
• Scottsdale's Soleri Bridge Is a Testament to the Artist -- But It Ain't Perfect
  April 21, 2011
• Fall Forward
  October 7, 2010

More About

• Dick Seeger
• Dave Hampton
• Paolo Soleri
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Ever the restless mind, in the '80s, Dick Seeger came up with a lucrative concept that made him enough money to buy the large Scottsdale house that today seconds as his personal museum.

In 1982, he patented SeegerPeople, an idea for three-dimensional photo sculptures featuring photographs mounted on stiff backing that were then carefully cut out by hand with a band saw — another tool in Seeger's arsenal of woodworking implements.

Pushed as a fun photo experience, Seeger's wacky cut-out photo constructions were inspired by a person or family's personality and hobbies, or a life event that just had to be commemorated, like pregnancy (before and after photos were often set side by side), birthdays, marriage and other experiences people felt compelled to memorialize. The artist was both photographic director, getting otherwise sensible people to do goofy things, and designer of the finished constructions, which often used completely fabricated or painted landscapes as backdrops.

Through the '80s, it was almost a rite of passage in the Valley to have a sitting at SeegerPeople, which the artist franchised worldwide until 1995. At one point, SeegerPeople thrived in Maui and Lausanne, Switzerland, and the opening of Newport Beach's Fashion Island franchise was big news in the L.A. Times in 1988. Several SeegerPeople studios are still going strong, one in the St. Louis area and one in Michigan.

The 1980s also brought the end of Seeger's 31-year marriage to Helen, but not before Seeger was subjected to what he calls "an unrequested attempted exorcism" by his wife's minister, who "tried to get the devil out of him." Spiritual, but not religious, Seeger found his wife's beliefs too much to handle — "apparently they didn't get the devil out of me; I still have it" — and divorce followed.

It wasn't long before he met Betty Helman, a much younger artist who worked at SeegerPeople and became his second spouse when she was 32, the same age as one of her new stepchildren. Though that marriage ended, Betty still regularly works for Seeger as an artist and they remain good friends to this day.

Leap to the current millennium. You'll find Dick Seeger has "retired," at least from any commercial enterprise. He bought and moved into his current house in a matter of two days in 2004 using six trucks and 13 moving men. Over an 18-month period, he built that 30-foot-high dirt pyramid with a front door opening onto more dirt, using a small tractor, a hand shovel and several strong backs ("I dig dirt," he quips), not to mention the 110-foot-long Mother Spiritual Earth dirt sculpture, surrounding moat and adjacent conversation area he says will hold 25 people.

On any given day — since he seems to move everything around, both inside and out, on a daily basis — there might be a life-size antique Indian brass horse standing guard over the pyramid amid a group of giant yucca stems stuck in the ground, or a replica Egyptian mummy case.

Or a reproduction terra cotta Xi'an warrior crafted after one of the 8,000 figures excavated from the burial site of a Chinese emperor dating to the third century B.C.

Seeger still is voraciously making his own art and collecting the art of world cultures during his world travels. He says his collecting ethnic art began full-bore when he was ushered into a Glendale warehouse stuffed with African artifacts.

"Something happened to me there," he says. "Sometimes, when I'm walking around this house, and I do walk around this house a lot, an ethnic object will feel like energy is coming from it."

Sometimes, his travels in search of things to collect are not without incident. One of those occurred when he and Betty were in Kashmir, India, on September 11, 2001.

"A friend of mine locally had family in Kashmir, and we were a guest in the family compound. It happened that the day before 9/11, their chauffeur killed the neighbor's son accidentally. The neighbor was of a different tribe and so my host said, 'You've got to get out of here right now,'" Seeger recalls.

That's how he and Betty found themselves spirited onto a flight to Bangkok, unable to get back into the United States because all air traffic had been suspended. But that didn't stop him from bringing home a huge load of Indian art he's now ensconced in his Magical Mystery Spiritual Experience.

When asked directly, Dick Seeger admits that he is obsessive compulsive, which explains his unending rearranging, unstoppable creating and collecting, and eternal striving for perfection.

"I can't stand chaos," he says with a shrug. "If it were not correct, then my head would not be correct."