Sam Hanchett

I’ve been painting for about fifteen years. Usually the images come from within; but even when using a picture or an object for inspiration, what I end up with is something I couldn’t have conceived of before beginning. The creative process itself proves most exciting for me when I take risks: proceeding more by instinct, much like an athlete does. My hope in letting my intuition lead in the creative process is that those unplanned brush-strokes will blend with the ones that are also intended, thus drawing the chaotic into something solid and contained. As an artist, this approach allows me to directly explore those strange, primitive inklings in opposition within me and presumably, us all. Once this combination of work, paint and energy concludes in breaking through, I become its viewer also, and what I find that this form of expression can do for us is to make possible a way to say or feel something significant that could only be conveyed through this language of paint and the surface it has been applied to.