A young a perceptive artist whose illuminating works on un-stretched and unprimed canvas have gained him the acclaim of a coterie of private and institutional art collectors. In his most recent efforts, this 39 year old contemporary artist has added to the excitement of his art through the use of the unstructured canvas as an actual medium in his work.
"Using the ragged edges of the canvas has enabled me to create more of a feeling of movement to my work," Sampson explained recently. "It also provides the viewer an insight into the actual process used to create the work. It is presented as it was conceived."
A jazz enthusiast, Sampson's most exuberant paintings are the expansion of melodic ideas. He sees his figurative portrayals as attempts "to emote, to touch, to move you to the center of it all, to enable you to feel certain changes, like fleeting moments of memory."
Sampson has completed a series of works portraying the life and play of the African-American men who starred in the Negro Baseball Leagues for nearly half a century and has been featured in numerous national publications such as Town & Country, Playbill, American Visions, and Black Enterprise magazines. He has been critically recognized in the Washington Post for his first retrospective at the University of Maryland in 1997, and in the International Review of African American Art comprehensive guide for collecting in 1998.
A major breakthrough came in 1997 when he was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to create a painting for their award winning ad campaign. Absolut Sampson has been a part of a traveling collection which has made stops in Miami, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
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