Stephanie Sampson in her Athens studio 2018

Stephanie Sampson  2015

Stephanie Sampson is a Canadian born visual artist of Greek background. She is a contemporary painter working mainly in oils, and also makes drawings, watercolours and ceramic art when they may inform her oils or develop from them. She divides her time between Canada and Greece.

There are artists whose methods she studies a lot: the thinly applied but sensuous use of paint of Arshile Gorky and Morandi, the brushstrokes and Intimism of Hodgkin and Matisse, the figure in modern and ancient Greek art, the simple forms of Rothenberg, the drawings of Boghiguian, In ceramics, Sampson is drawn to Neolithic and Greek ceramics and  modern ceramicists J.B.Blunk and Simone Fattal.

Sampson studied Visual Arts at Bath Academy of Art in the UK and in 1991 she received her MFA in Painting from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Her art education in the 80’s and 90’s was dominated by minimalist formalism and conceptual art which she reacted against in favor of a more autobiographical painting language; she does value however the minimalist sense of economy and the deliberate considered mark. She defends the importance of painting believing that the physicality of brushstrokes and colour uniquely record mind and body within the interplay of picture making and painting process.  Sampson’s method is to not overwork the surface, so that the properties of oil paint can be experienced.

Stephanie Sampson

Stephanie Sampson cv 2021 CV

                 all art and text and photos copyright © Stephanie Sampson