Nihility

“To me, what is very important in painting is not to think when you paint. You can think before you paint, you can think after you have painted, but while you are painting thinking is the worst thing you can do” (Robert Ryman).

Taking a leaf out of Robert Ryman’s book, ‘Nihility’ is an escape into painting, and an emotional response to Sams’s crazy world. Dipping her toe into minimalism, her paintings explore what happens when the intention of the artist meets the unpredictable properties of the media. 

The challenge for Sam in creating these works was resisting the natural impulse to impose too much intention and restriction. Instead Sam needed to maintain just enough control to give shape to the paintings while responding throughout the process to the forms and textures that emerged in an unpredictable way from the media used.