Interesting Times

I am chuffed. The news is terrible right now and the air in Philadelphia feels like wet sock, but yesterday evening the Firehouse Art Center posted this little video and ever since then I have had a very specific kind of happiness blooming in my heart that is pretty much summed up by that great British understatement of a word.

Here it is. The pieces shown are from my Saga Series, and they are part of  their Interesting Times exhibition.

This video thrills me largely because there are three pieces on that wall. I paint these pieces so that when they are hung end to end they flow together. I carefully make sure that the colors in left edge of each new piece line up exactly with the right edge of the last one, but I can only hang two of them at a time in my studio, so I've actually never seen them all in a row before. They work just like I'd hoped, and I couldn't be happier to see how beautifully they were installed.

I'm also delighted to see them out in the world. These pieces take a long time, and although I've shown them to people in my studio, this exhibition is their first. The curator, Brandy Coons, did a great job of picking the other artists in the exhibit. Kathryn Jill Johnson and Robin Hextrum both make wonderful work. If you're in the Boulder area, check it out!




I've written in past blog posts about Saga 1 and 2, but I didn't have time to post about Saga 3.


Samantha Simpson, Saga 3, Ink and watercolor on paper, 92" x 51", 2018

There is a lot happening in this piece and you can see details on my website here. 

One thing that people might not guess is that this piece references Monet.




Call it a remix.



Samantha Simpson, Saga 3 detail, Ink and watercolor on paper, 92" x 51", 2018

If you're interested in seeing updates on work in progress, please follow me on instagram! I'm slow about updating this blog but I'm better over there, where I post as the_drawist.  There are even details of Saga 4, which I'm working on right now.













*I am Canadian, so I feel I'm entitled to be chuffed by virtue of our association with the Queen.

Still, still, I mean it, After All

My book is here!

It's finally done and I'm so happy about how it came out- I've been working on it for over a year, on and off, trying to figure out how to translate my  text heavy images into the book form. It's a project I was very interested in because for a long time I've been thinking that my work lies somewhere between painting and writing. Many of my pieces have repeating characters and themes and several of my images work as chapters in on ongoing narrative, rather than conclusions in and of themselves.

 It's very satisfying to have this series of pieces in a book format, all together, in sequence, with the important text readable in the correct order.  The book is 144 pages long and the images are large and only slightly less vivid than the originals. I love it. You can take a look at the first 15 or so pages by clicking the little image below, which links you to a little preview of the book on Blurb, the print-on-demand site where I had the book made.

Still, Still, I Mean It, After All

By Samantha Simpson

If you'd like to purchase a copy, you can do so at that link too, but be warned: the softcover version is totally beautiful but way more expensive than what you'd pay for a similar book in a bookstore. This is what happens when one can't get thousands of copies of a book published in China. There is an ebook version available as well, and I get about the same amount of money from sales of either book, so if you're interested in supporting what I so by buying a book, do what fits your budget. If you are a huge fan and would like a personalized copy, please email me at sam@samanthasimpson.com and I will make arrangements to send one your way!

Saga 2

Saga 2 is up on the website! I'm in the thickets of Saga 3 right now, but I still love working large. Saga 2 is seven feet eight inches long. Here is a tiny picture of the huge painting. You can see it bigger on my website.

There are are some funny references in the piece. The black ship on the right is the U.S.S. Constitution, and the one on the S.S. United States, which is a sad wreck of an ex-cruise ship that is docked across from IKEA in Philadelphia. There are several recognizable political figures in the painting (many of them show up as a well-dressed species of invasive aquatic sponge) and the flowers from Saga 1 , which I came to think of as hysterical media beasts, have weaponized their speech. These paintings connect end to end, and they are meant to be read as one big narrative, from left to right.

I post pictures of my work in progress on Instagram a fair amount now (I'm the_drawist), and there's a nice picture of Saga 1 and 2 together there, as well as a few shots from a wonderful show I saw at the National Gallery recently: Outliers and American Vanguard Art, which was so, so good.

Politics (In the Weeds with Snakes and Saga 1)

I'm working on a series of paintings that are more explicitly political than what I've made before. In The Weeds With Snakes, from earlier this year, is very clearly about a personal reaction to the election. The content of this piece is impossible to see at a small size but you can click the link above to see details.

And this, below, is also an allegorical response to the current climate. It's also huge: it's an 8 foot watercolor and ink painting on paper. I love making giant watercolors, and I'm well into making the next one in this series. I'm going to make several of these large pieces. Each painting will continue the action the one before it, and the edges will match, so images flow from painting to painting. I've titled the first one of these paintings Saga 1, but I may well change that title as I get more of the series done. You can see more of Saga 1 on my website, here.

Samantha Simpson, Saga 1 (Working Title), Ink and watercolor on paper, 96" x 51", 2017

The large sequential pieces are based loosely on the saga of the Danian war that winds around Trajan's column in Rome.

I've been lucky enough to teach in Rome a couple times, and when I'm there I always visit the huge hole in the ground that surrounds Trajan's column. You can't easily get right up close to the images that wind around the column, but there is a long set of informational displays that show the images unwound in one long line. I'm always moved by those pictures. I know very little about the historical context of what I'm seeing, but it feels like a message from a lost society about the cost of a battle. It's a victory column with a message: we did this. Don't do it again. If you're interested, there's a great website that shows the images here. You can see details of my work on my website or on instagram, where I post in-progess shots of what I'm up to from time to time.

Philadelphia civic pride and frogs about the election

I'm particularly Philly proud this month because my work is in two group shows in two of my favorite civic buildings. 

You can see my work in A City of Artists, Celebrating the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours Philadelphia Art in City Hall gallery in room 116 on the first floor of City Hall. The exhibition was organized by the wonderful people at CFEVA and runs through December 2, 2016. The show celebrated the Philadelphia Open Studio Tours, which run annually in October, and which brought some lovely people to my studio last weekend.

A tiny book with images from my paintings will also be on view in another Philadelphia civic building in November: I'm in the Philadelphia Center for the Book's Little Lexicons exhibition at the Philadelphia Free Library's Central branch. The exhibition will be up from November 4th to January 13, 2017, and I couldn't be more thrilled. The Philadelphia Library is one of my favorite places in Philadelphia, and I am a regular. I especially love their Print and Picture collection and the exhibitions up in the Rare Books Collection. If you are from Philadelphia and you haven't been up there, you should go, stat. (Because Grip!)


And last but not at all least, my latest frog painting, What We Must Do, is in a show curated by the brilliant Susan Coote in Episcopal Academy's Crawford Gallery called Messages and American Dreams, which is up until November 16th, 2016. I'm delighted that Susan included this piece it: she's an amazing curator, and these frogs are all about the election, so it's wonderful to have them in this show.

Two new paintings: Visions and What we Must Do

I just put two new paintings on the website. The first one, Visions, is one that I started last fall before a brain injury and resultant vision problems stopped me working for a long time. There was a break in the middle of making this painting, but that worked out well. It's a complicated painting. The piece is about envisioning and vision, how we see ourselves and how we see painting.

The main text, which starts in the banner on the left, says, "If we presume it comes from what we need..." 

It continues across the top of the painting, "Maybe we should come to terms."

What I'm talking about here is my sense that there are vast areas of aesthetic pleasure and exploration that are left out of most art making. It's the same sensibility that motivates a lot of lowbrow work, but in my case I'm intent upon reconciling my sense of what is important in my daily life with what I value in painting. I'm trying to integrate my visual and psychological pleasures; my tendency to be an aesthetic omnivore and my desire to create a narrative complexity that honors lived experience.

These flowers are saying "It's us against the world" and "But, but...I like the world!" The first flower replies: "Oh Yeah."

(I hardly ever draw myself in paintings, except as a frog or bug.)

There are three big eyes in the painting. Each one is different. This one says, "The looked-at eye, imagined, adored. " The one on the left below is labeled, "The neutral, seeing eye, perceiving, confused." and the one on the right is the biological eye.

The turtle is making a proclamation. It says, "Perhaps there's more to be gained from a reconstruction of the natural than from the pseudo scientific narrative of modernity, which, let's face it, leaves everything out." The blue creature behind the turtle is a glyptodon, which is a wonderful prehistoric armadillo-like creature the size of a Volkswagen beetle.

I've made several small experimental drawings and paintings that I haven't put on the website, but I do post them, and pictures of work in progress, on instagram. You can follow me @ the_drawist. There are several new little paintings and drawings on instagram that began as test pieces: I've been trying out some new materials, thinking about making more pieces that lean more towards painting than drawing. 

The piece below, which is called, What We Must Do is almost entirely a painting. Only the eye of the large frog is drawn in ink. It's on a panel, and although I liked making it, I doubt I'll give up my pens any time soon.

(I mentioned above that I rarely do self portraits that are not frogs or bugs. In this piece I'm the frog on the bottom right.)

You can see details of my pieces on my website, and if you have any questions, ask away...

2015 Went Out With a Bang..On the Head

Samantha Simpson, Pumpkinhead and the Egg (detail), Watercolor, 2015 

My website shows hardly any work for 2015 and unfortunately there is a very good reason for that.  I spent the summer making a book, and there are a few paintings I haven't put up there yet, but the big problem was that I sustained a major brain injury. I concussed myself, badly, doing nothing very impressive. I was sweeping up some crap off the floor and when I stood up I hit my head hard on a counter. And that started a serious four month process of healing from my fourth concussion.

My first concussion was when I was in thrird grade. Fell off a wall, woke up in an ambulance. Second was in college. Bike accident: passed out, woke up, wore a neck brace for a while, done. My third was five years ago: banged my head on some scaffolding, felt sick for about a week. This one was far, far worse. I damaged my brain. I severely knocked off my vision and sense of balance. There is a pretty good article online here that talks about someone else who had a major concussion with vestibular issues: my experience was like his in many ways, but it was also better and worse. I healed much faster than him because I did vestibular therapy, which works really well. My experience was worse than his because I also had severe vision problems. I couldn't read, much less drive. Looking at anything too difficult (text, a phone, a pattern, knitting) blew out my vision almost immediately. It would double and stick that way. The combination of the vision and the vestibular issues made it difficult for me to do very specific visual tasks. My eyes didn't track well together, so I couldn't handle stripes, patterns, looking back and forth or near and far quickly, or looking at too much fine detail. I'd get a migrane, then dizziness, then my vision would blur out, then the world would start tilting and I'd have to high tail it to a dark room. Vestibular issues mean that you offload your balance problems to your visual cortex, so that you can't handle too much visual stimulus without falling over, so I was very very dizzy a lot, and I hung out in dark closets like some crazy art professor Quasimodo when I was teaching in order to reset my brain between classes. I did manage to do a few sad paintings of bruised pumpkin heads, but that's about it. It was a pretty miserable fall. (You might notice that the image above is blurry. Yeah.)

But on Tuesday I got kicked out of vision therapy. I can read, I can work on screens, I'm cleared to drive and I can do my art (Stripey! With lots of detail! And patterns!) so I'm hard at work, and so happy about it. I'm back at work on a painting I started this summer, and it's great to be at it again. 

Mummers!

This year I was in Philadelphia for New Years, which meant I had the great pleasure of photographing the mummers! It is one of my favorite ways to start the new year. Enjoy.

I will post new work soon, I hope. I had an injury that messed up my vision for a while, but I'm almost done recovering and can't wait to get back in the studio.

Apparition

I've got another new piece up: Apparition. You can see it larger here, and there are details that show most of the text online too...

The frog in the orange coat is a self portrait, and my husband is on the far left. Try not to make a fuss if you recognize us in the street.

The floating spaceman-creature in the clouds is from Das Triadische Ballet, a dance that was originally choreographed by Oscar Schlemmer in 1922. He also designed the costumes, which are amazing.

I had never come across it before, although many people I know had already seen it. There was a great reconstruction of the dance that was done in 1970 on youtube. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you get comfortable, maximize the little video below and have a look. I love it.

Pattern Pieces and Pond Book

I just posted a new image to the blog: it's called Pattern Pieces, and you can see it on the website here.

I've been thinking about patterns: how they comfort and mislead us. This piece is about that idea. The blue pattern of feathers behind the swan has sewing marks.

There are two main things happening in the piece: there is the swan overlooking the frogs and flowers in a menacing fashion, and there are the frogs, who are performing a play.

The actor frogs are dressed as flowers and swans. The frogs on the bottom right of this detail are playing out the action: there is a frog who is playing a swan (fake beak, feathers) being attacked by a frog who is behind him, dressed as a flower.

The real flowers in the piece function as a chorus. They comment on the action. The flower on the right below says, "I'm not sure..." and the one on the left says, "I have been ready my whole life!"

It's been a busy summer. I made a book! It just arrived in the mail the other day, and it looks great.

The book is based on a series of paintings that I've been calling my Pond pieces. The paintings in that series play out a complex narrative about art and beauty. The structure of the book is loosely similar to that of a graphic novel: each piece is shown in such a way that the text can be read in order, so that characters and themes that repeat from piece to piece can be clearly seen in a progression. 

I'm in the proofing stage now- I made one copy of the book and so far I'm thrilled .

I'd love to send one to all the wonderful people who have supported my work, but it turns out that it's disgustingly expensive to make a nice quality art book. The next step, once I finish the final adjustments, will be to see if I can get some funding and send it around to commercial publishers. Suggestions about potential publishers or curators or gallerists who might like to see this work are more than welcome: I'm excited about what I'm making and can use any ideas about finding an audience for this work.