Women's Issue: Artillery Magazine →

Samantha Fields

Samantha Fields’ paintings unfold along a darkly fanciful and increasingly multifaceted continuum of disaster and perception in storm fronts, fires, abandoned dreams and other metaphors for societal decline, mediated by uncanny photographic intercessions. She’s currently painting storms—their violent clashing and cleansing suits the era, and opportunities to expand her jewel-toned naturalism are many. She started on them
pre-lockdown, after photographing multi-tornadic phenomena in Texas. When everything changed—BLM, the lengthening pandemic, the insurrection, massive wildfires—she turned instead to the “American Dream” paintings: landscapes of winter’s discontent festooned in confetti and party balloons.

Recently, in Texas again, she photographed myriad storms which will be on view at Rory Devine Fine Arts in October. Her prismatic “Worlds Within Worlds,” based on dreamlike, anxiously shifting photos of her own backyard, were shown this summer at Berkeley’s Traywick Contemporary, and her affecting wildfire paintings are in two institutional shows this year. Along the way she became chair of the art department at California State University, Northridge—the first woman to hold the post—where she’s focusing on access, interdepartmental collaboration, and local and international exchanges. “When I came on board,” she says, “I kept asking, ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ and the answer was always, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ So, hell yeah, let’s do all the things!”

––Shana Nys Dambrot