Sam King on Painting and Process

Sam King has exhibited at galleries, artist-run spaces, and universities across the country, including The Painting Center (NYC), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati), Oneoneone Gallery (Chapel Hill), Laconia Gallery (Boston), The Provincial (Kaleva, MI), Living Arts of Tulsa, MIXD (Rogers, AR), the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Tulsa, Lower Columbia College, and Western Connecticut State University. In 2020, King was a resident of Hambidge Center, supported by the Lee and Margaret Echols fellowship for musicians (he records and performs improvisational, microtonal guitar music under the name Untight). In 2019, he curated Shelters, Monuments, featuring the work of artists Whiting Tennis and Sarah Norsworthy, for The Provincial, an artist-run space in Kaleva, MI. With Christopher Lowrance, King co-founded MW Capacity, a website devoted primarily to painting in the Midwest. With Stephanie Pierce, he co-founded Lalaland, a DIY community projects space in Fayetteville, AR, active 2011-2019. He has also been a resident artist at Vermont Studio Center and Ox-Bow School of Art, an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and a recipient of the Arkansas Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship. His work is held in a number of public and private collections. King earned a Bachelor Fine Arts degree from the University of Tulsa (2003) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University (2005). He resides in Fayetteville, AR, where he serves as an Associate Director of the University of Arkansas School of Art.

"Much of the meaning of my work is embedded in its physicality, process, and composition. I am enamored of the material trappings of painting: not just paint and canvas, but staple-holes, tears, creases, and off-cuts, and at times, the artifacts of digital and hybrid formats. My process is improvisational, and I tend to work on a lot of paintings at once. If a painting is not going well (or it was at one point "finished," and no longer seems sufficiently resolved), I take it off its stretchers, cut it up, and use the pieces to start new works. In this way, a single, failing painting might be the germ of five or ten new ones. By alternatingly reinforcing and transgressing conventions of visual perception, I hope to engage, perhaps even implicate, the viewer in the work. I arrived at this method of making art after years of experimentation and interrogation of painting as a vehicle for communication. I rarely seek out source material, in the sense of a specific painting serving to record a particular scene, moment, or emotion, but also, I think of painting in terms of metaphor and embodiment. My work tends to exist in a suspended, liminal state, like something is there to be recognized, reassembled, or decoded. I can't quite say why I started working this way, but I've indulged a persistent, gnawing instinct to rework old paintings for many years, long before they look like they do now. There is something in them, for me, about the interconnectedness and malleability of our collective and individual experiences, tensions between structure and intuition, and the slipperiness of time, narrative, memory, and interpretation."