Becoming water
The paintings of Samantha Clark
When I first saw Samantha Clark’s paintings at the RSA ‘Orcadia’ exhibition in January, 2025, I was astonished. I had entered the gallery with my usual low expectations about being moved or inspired in such places, and I got a surprise.
‘Cloud, Moon, Wave’ reeled me in like a fish. It settled gently around my solar plexus and said, ‘You’ve felt it too, the moon like this, hanging in the cold island air, haven’t you?’
I guessed that an image that spoke to me like this could not have been created with the usual painterly brushstrokes; something was different. When I got close up, I saw that not only were there layers and layers of running paint, but on top of them, a curious geometric mesh. The mesh itself was layered, spinning off below the surface of the painting.
Thin white, or grey, or black lines, repeated, over and over and over again, until they formed a mysterious web of time, and space, and air.
Sometimes the lines were not straight but curved, or met themselves as bubbling circles.
As you stand in front of one of these paintings, you can't avoid the fact of its creation; the hundreds and hundreds of hours making mark after tiny mark, day in, day out, for weeks on end.
It makes me think of the paintings in the National Gallery of Scotland, the Rubens and the Tiepolo; the hours and weeks and months of patient working on fine detail as the painting slowly builds.
Except that in Sam’s case, there’s no human-created grand vision, no classical myth or ancient story. There’s no story at all, only the vibration of sea and air and salt as they hum in the memory of a single experiencing human, patiently returning to the materials, again and again; one line at a time, on the shapes of running paint, surfaces of brushed gold.
Something grows, slowly, from the repetition; from a human awareness being confronted every day with a changing landscape of suggestion and resonance, forming its own response without conscious thought. The result is something that goes beyond a human thought-creation.
People who don’t make art often think that an artist has an idea or a vision in their mind, which they then give form to in the world. This is not what I see in Sam Clark’s work. I see a field of open attention, a practice which resists conscious shaping and instead makes space for a barely conscious dance between elements, flesh, material and air.
Oh my goodness Tamsin, thank you so much for your careful, open-hearted and deeply thoughtful response to my paintings. 🙏
I particularly love the final paragraph.