Zachary Selig - Career

Career

His first publication as author and illustrator was the bestselling Kundalini Awakening - A Gentle Guide to Chakra Activation and Spiritual Growth.

Selig is a magic realist painter. His skills as a spiritist and painter led to the creation of a unique codex titled Relaxatia, an ancient Solar Kundalini paradigm that he rediscovered through Tarascan Nahaulli high priests in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero, Mexico. It is a codex of the human chakra system and the solar light spectrum, designed to activate Kundalini in color-coded paintings.

Selig has made commissioned portraits and works of art for Isabel Goldsmith-Patiño, eldest daughter of Sir James Goldsmith and granddaughter of Antenor Patiño, Prince Egon von Fürstenberg, Catherine Oxenberg and Kelly LeBrock, among others. Exhibitions featuring Selig's paintings include "100th Anniversary of Hollywood - Portraits of the Stars" held at the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and "Organic Landscapes" sponsored by Versace in Beverly Hills.

An E! True Hollywood Story featured Selig and his close friendship with actress and fashion model Margaux Hemingway. He was helped launch Hemingway's career in the 1970s, and established the initial marketing and public relations format that helped make her a global celebrity, introducing Hemingway to a circle of fashion professionals in New York that included photographer Francesco Scavullo, designer Halston, Vogue editor Francis Stein and Marian McEvoy, a fashion editor for Women's Wear Daily.

Selig and Hemingway privately studied Solar Kundalini, yoga and meditation together at the Hemingway family's property in Ketchum, Idaho, adjacent to Sun Valley. Several years later, Hemingway made Selig the creative director for her 1990 Playboy magazine cover and pictorial by photographer Arny Freytag that was shot in Belize.

Selig is a Yoruba priest and renowned spiritual consultant. He was the consultant of paranormal phenomena for director Tobe Hooper and the production of Spontaneous Combustion (1990), a film about psychokinetic powers. It received a nomination for best film in the 1991 Fantasporto International Fantasy Film Awards.

His background as an artist, spiritist and his trompe-l'oeil painting are used in his work as an interior designer. He trained with the New York City interior design team of Bunny Mellon and Cartier designer Aldo Cipullo where he mastered trompe-l'oeil painting techniques, and his first commissioned trompe-l'oeil interiors were showcased in a 1971 House Beautiful article featuring Cipullo's residence in Manhattan. In California he restored and decorated a suite of interiors in the Villa d'Este, a historic Italianate courtyard villa that was built circa 1928 for Cecil B. DeMille in West Hollywood. The early 20th century Italian Renaissance style building, with its elaborately painted portico, ceiling decorations and frieze, was a former residence of silent film star Pola Negri. Selig specializes in Sekhem, utilizing an 8,000 year old pre-dynastic Egyptian Neteru design theurgy with classical and modern design elements in the art of interior design harmonics.

In 2011, Selig contributed the first detailed biographical data of his mentor Bridget Bate Tichenor's mother Vera Bate Lombardi and her relationship to Coco Chanel for the book Sleeping With The Enemy - Chanel's Secret War by Hal Vaughan. Artist Pedro Friedeberg dedicated a chapter on Zachary Selig in his book of memoirs De Vacaciones Por La Vida (Holiday For Life) with eight friends that included Salvador Dalí, Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, Tamara de Lempicka, Mathias Goeritz, Edward James, and Bridget Bate Tichenor.