Sam Lock lives and works in Brighton. His paintings contain surfaces built up over time and through approaches and material choices, where layers, scratches, colours, stains, marks, floods, remnants and hints co-exist. His processes of painting are built around remembering, losing, forgetting and rediscovering the creative choices he has made.
What place in the world has inspired you?
I studied for an MA in Fine Art with specialisms in Painting and History of Art at Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1997. Living in Edinburgh gives you an all-pervading sense of history and an awareness that you are merely the latest layer; it is a city of hidden stories that seem to whisper to you and dark corners full of lost information. It has an identity that is both dark and beautiful, playful and sober, wild and solid; the duplicity of the city makes it hard to define, forcing you to live in the margins, the spaces in-between. Since leaving Edinburgh, my practice has been a pursuit of a visual language that explores this dichotomy; I have tried to find a tone of voice for my paintings that tells yet conceals, imagery that is both inviting and elusive, physical yet spacial, open and closed, warm yet melancholic. My paintings aim to present part of a story for the gaps to be filled in by the viewer, to allude to places that have been seen before but are only part-remembered, reduced to colours, marks, traces, remnants.
My paintings are accumulations of materials and decisions; artefacts of thinking and doing, an attempt to locate poetry in the relationships, combinations and interactions between materials and physical elements.
One favourite living artist? Why?
Glen Onwin – his work is intelligent, ambitious, alchemic, substantial – attributes I want my paintings to contain.
One favourite historical artist? Why?
Antoni Tapies – his paintings are physically engaging and his painterly decision-making is free, empowering and full of adventure.
If you could exhibit in any gallery which would it be?
The Natural History Museum
Where and what is your studio?
My studio is part of the top 2 floors of an old townhouse on Queens Road, central Brighton, shared with 5 other painters. My studio room is ideal, rundown, crumbling, cracked, a completely unprecious space, encouraging a physical and experimental material approach.
What one word would describe your feeling of doing your work?
Absorbed.
1 comment:
I have a pair of Sam Lock paintings right here, which I bought when he exhibited at Thompson Towers during the Artists and Makers Festival. Great artist, love living with his work.
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