Influenced by twentieth-century European modernism, Sam's work explores colour, form and the light and space between, creating compositions of structured yet spontaneous abstraction. Paint is applied freely with large sweeping brushstrokes over delicate velaturas of modulated colour. Cools melt into warms as new colour harmonies are discovered and coalesce.
Drawing on her time as a student painting frescoes in Italy, pure pigment features in much of Sam's work, giving a radiance and soft velvety depth to the paintings. Sam studied Buddhism for a number of years, practising meditation as a key to opening imaginative perception, later using the shapes of the sea nearby and flowers from the gardens which surround her studio as inspiration for her work. Here, Sam finds subtle evocations, motifs emerge from beneath the paint layers, suggestive and dreamlike. These forms are sometimes enveloped by an impasto window, other times shapes are left to float away. It represents a way of seeing and feeling that Sam translates according to her own distinctive vision of abstraction.
Sam was awarded a First Class honours degree in Fine Art at Exeter College of Art. She continues to study under Robin Child, whose own professor was a pupil of Walter Sickert.
' ... these jumbles of strange things, in which the eye loves to chase thousands of apparitions.'
Odilon Redon. La Gironde, 1869