High Hopes 1 - Limited Edition of 1 Photograph

British born artist Samantha Schulz graduated from Bradford College UK with a BA in Art and Design with Distinction, specializing in Fine Art printmaking In her final year she was nominated for The Graduate Artist of the Year Award. She left England in 1990 and has since lived in eight different countries, all the while collecting inspiration from her experiences of life in cities as diverse as Paris, Istanbul, and Kuala Lumpur. She currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. There are several constants in the work, namely layers, light and colour. Samantha Schulz aims to capture light within a surface by building a work comprising of contrasting layers. They are made of resin, acrylic paint, a variety of mediums, foils and gold leaf etc. The motivation remains the need to create an image where beauty matters, where the viewer can lose themselves in colour and light. Developing artworks that can add light to a space. During the process of creating the mixed media pieces she discovered that she could also achieve her goals using the medium of photography and so she created this series of unique fineart photographs, which compliment the mixed media pieces whilst retaining a distinctive quality of their own. The commonality in all of these pieces, on canvas, paper, and perspex, is the multitude of layers of which they each comprise, forcing the viewer to investigate further, quite literally, what lies beneath. This layering of diverse media from acrylic washes, spray paint, to resin and gold leaf, combines seemingly incongruous media and gestural marks to form a harmonious surface. The Abstract Expressionists remain a constant influence on her work. Inspiration coming from the works of Cy Twombly, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and Mark Rothko among others. The emphasis is placed on the importance of the process and embracing spontaneity in the evolution of work.