"Breaking the Surface" Painting

Samantha French is known for her oil paintings of women suspended in water, images that hover between submersion and emergence. Rooted in memories of childhood summers spent in the lakes of Northern Minnesota, where she was born and raised, her work explores tranquility, vulnerability, and the emotional resonance of water. A 2005 graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, French paints from her own photography. Her compositions are often cropped and viewed from beneath the surface, capturing refracted light, shifting movement, and the quiet stillness of floating bodies. Water becomes both setting and metaphor: a space of weightlessness, reflection, and escape. Now based in the Hudson Valley, New York, French is a full-time painter whose work is held in private and public collections internationally. This ongoing body of work serves as a link to home and a continual search for the feeling of sun on your face, suspended time, and the calm of days spent sinking and floating. Through layered surfaces and luminous color, she preserves the fleeting qualities of water and remembrance.