To view or purchase work by Sam Albright visit this Gallery
Much of making art has to do with the craft needed to work with the materials, being present, and empty enough to allow them to guide, direct and inspire. A painting is an interaction with “real” materials that has a physical presence in the room. When it works, it creates a view into a world that only lives in the painting. Hopefully the finished work will stimulate a response in the viewer and embody something of the artist. Painting is like cooking, it takes time and practice and it’s good to have practiced making many different recipes. Water and inks, oils and pigments, wood, metal or Photoshop and After Effects all have their own skills to learn. In music we say it’s 10,000 hours of real practice to play an instrument well, I believe it’s the same with the visual arts. After the materials, techniques and recipes are embodied we hope the art will show up. What comes out is filtered through the individual artists personality and history, making each piece unique to that particular moment.
My mother was a watercolor painter, so gathering up my kit and heading out to paint feels very natural. We can slow down and tune into what is happening at that moment in the world and put a little tidbit of it on our paper. Watercolor is kind of the opposite of oils, both having their own “recipes”. Good paper is such a joy to work on, the fresh surface calling out for wet fluid paint.
It’s important to keep the techniques of “real” materials alive while embracing the amazing digital tools we have available. Carrying a sketchbook and taking my own reference photos has been part of my technique as long as I’ve been painting. And drawing everyday is just part of life, how I interact with my ideas and the world. I will set up still life objects, paint from a model or paint live in the field if the subject is about depicting a view of the world or about the light bouncing around in that scene. I love that style of painting as nature is the finest teacher. Painting need not be limited to views of the world though, it might be about a concept or idea, better communicated through symbols or the feeling created by a certain arrangement of color and value, or a whirling energy from a dream, it’s all up for grabs.
A painting is real. It’s paint. It refracts and reflects light deep into the translucent layers of the paint. Each painting is, by it’s very hand made nature, unique, and one of a kind. It’s an event that has time built into it.
2019 & 2020
I love the materials of painting, pushing around tiny particles of color in the fluid translucence of oil or water or plastering on thick opaque layers that completely obliterate anything underneath.
Working with oils is like coming back home after a long journey. I have to walk around the neighborhood for a while to get my bearings and then I’m off and running. The pigments are pretty much the same that artists have been using for hundreds of years with a few modern variations and refinements, but modern solvents and mediums are a bit different and they say, less toxic and more archival. The studio doesn’t smell like turpentine anymore.
Rheology – 2017
This series began at in early 2017 using a narrow set of materials, water, ink and a few earth pigments collected in my area of Eastern Washington.
Elemental Edges 2006 – 2009
This series of highly textured acrylic paintings is inspired by my interest in the edges of things, the edges or interfaces where one thing ends and another begins, where two elements meet, such as where a meadow meets a forest, or the water wears the stone. This is the place of the greatest dynamism, diversity and transformational processes. These paintings explore these transitional zones through color and texture.
Sculpture:
Stupa at Tara Mandala
In the late 1990s Ren and I were students of the renowned Buddhist teacher Tsultrim Aleone. Tsultrim asked me to design and carve the Snow Lions and the Enlightenment rings for the Stupa that was to be built at the retreat land, Tara Mandala in Colorado. These pictures chronicle the carving of the Snow Lions.
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