Sam Chappell

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Bio
Sam Chappell is an acrylic painter living in Portland, Maine. Having spent much of her life shuttling up and down the East Coast, she has a soft spot for both coastal scenes and the views and hiking paths further inland. From an early age, Sam had a love of art and design - but for many years was on the viewer-side, graduating from college with a Bachelor’s in Art History. It hadn’t even occurred to her to be a maker of art, until 2020 came around, and she found herself in need of a creative outlet during the isolation of the pandemic. Sam's new outlet quickly snowballed into a daily painting practice - first, painting from photos collected in past travels, and later expanding to photos from explorations along the coast and hikes throughout the Western Carolinas (where she was living at the time).  Now, that daily practice is one of her greatest sources of fulfillment. 

Statement

How do you show how a place feels? Alive. A bit magical. Calming. Restless. 

To me, the act of being in nature is inseparable from feeling. Every landscape has its own personality, which in turn can spark a different series of emotions.

I rely on a play of colors and expressive brushstrokes in an attempt to relate the whole experience of a landscape, in the hopes that the viewer can build their own relationship and emotional attachment to it. 

My paintings are love letters to my favorite places, records of where I’ve been, and places I dream of going. But more importantly, what are they to you?