Samantha is a Maryland-based artist who works out of her cozy, in-home art studio where there’s as much paint on the carpet as her canvases. She is a daydreamer who likes to keep her hands and mind active and just make stuff! Through values like risk-taking, authenticity, appreciation for beauty, and creativity, Samantha finds the arts to be a reliable guide in navigating life’s challenges. In addition to the arts, she loves walking in nature, cooking for family, and adventures in traveling.
Major milestones in her studies include her A.A.S. in Computer Graphics from Carroll Community College in 2021 and her B.A. in Art from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She has won awards for her art including a graphic design freelance logo contest (2021), Carroll Community College’s Holiday Greeting Card Contest (2021), the St. Mary’s Senior Purchase Award (2012), and the PNC Bank Junior Art Award (2012). Previously, she was a resident artist at 310 Art in Asheville, NC. She has shown her work at DoodleHATCH in Columbia, MD. She interned and was a student employee for the Marketing and Student Engagement Offices at Carroll Community College, and now is the Web Editor for Carroll. Samantha’s education and experience in the art field has been of the highest value to her.
Samantha utilizes surrealistic imagery and symbolism to investigate unexamined worlds. In balancing abstraction and realism, she communicates an alternative way of seeing what is all around us. To develop her work, her process includes making three-dimensional models, paper cut-outs, sketches, and preliminary works in the Adobe Suite, as well as intuitively applying paint and seeking out imagery within it. In her latest painting series, she uses scale and perspective to re-envision environments which draw relationships between the world of bugs and humans.
“There is another world, and it is this one.” – Paul Éluard
These paintings are imaginings of the spiritual universe of bugs as a metaphor for the smallness of humans on the cosmic scale. In envisioning the world from a bug’s perspective, we catch glimpses of our own world; societies that are vast and bustling, whose environment is an otherworldly mystery. This is a world where crumbs and specks of dirt are savored, but where lives are stomped and swatted out of being. Where hierarchies are an antidote to life’s uncertainties, where metamorphosis rebirths the untouchables, and where synergetic flowers flourish as a testament to the legacies of bugs. Though about as minute as fingerprints, these fanciful creatures pack serious reactive power. This body of work straddles abstraction and realism to pay tribute to the alternate reality of bugs.
As a graphic designer, Samantha is influenced by her background as a fine artist. Having been trained to see things compositionally, she came into design with an understanding that even small shifts in placement or size can change the viewer’s experience of a piece. When introduced to the Adobe Suite, Samantha found an immediacy to experimentation that is difficult in slow drying, permanent oil paint, and gradients and transparencies can quickly simulate the blending and glazing of paint. Her love of painting and passion for design go hand in hand.
Samantha’s work is client-focused and she enjoys the challenge of adapting to new styles and criteria. Skilled at coming to define a problem’s parameters through asking thought-provoking questions, Samantha creates visual concepts that effectively communicate client’s ideas.
