| Sampson-Files uses a similar approach with acrylics, covering the canvas with a wash of color that she wants to be visible in the final painting. For The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, an acrylic of rodeo bulls, she first coated the entire canvas with a green wash, then drew in the images with a colored pencil. To enphasize design, she blocked out shapes and painted each bull in bright contrasting colors, giving them each a distinctive surreal personality. Birds and animals often remind Sampson-Files of humans, which leads to amusing titles. Curious Cows suggests gossips waiting to hear the latest news, while a pompous red, white and blue Texas longhorn has been dubbed Beauty Queen, and a bossy range cow is The Mother-in-Law. "Not like my own," she quickly explains. |
Wild
Horses, pastel, 22" x 30"
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The
Joneses |
A native of Utah, Sampson-Files grew up in Moab drawing cartoons. Though she attended college on a ceramics scholarship, she says, "I didn't like ceramics so I ended up taking fabric design and all the other art classes instead." After getting married and having children, she moved art to the back burner but kept it as a hobby. She experimented with oils, but dust and the hair of pets and kids got stuck in the paint before it dried so she returned to pastels, which her father had introduced her to as a child, and to acrylics, because they dried before becoming contaminated. In 2000, with all of her children in school, Sampson-Files finally got serious about art. Since then, she has won several awards across Colorado's Western Slope, where her work is featured in several galleries, and she was selected by HorsePower New Mexico to participate in the 2002 Trail of the Painted Ponies with her design Primarily Bull, featuring the faces of rodeo bulls painted on a life-size horse sculpture. Now that's really wild! Wildlife
Art - May/June 2005 |
