Sam King on Painting and Process
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Release Date: 09/12/2025
I Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this episode, I'm diving into open calls including what jurors look for when reviewing applications, and why the description box is crucial for providing context about your artwork. I'm also sharing practical tips on how artists can use detailed descriptions to make their submissions stand out and highlighting resources for artists to improve their application process. I Like Your Work Links: Thank you to our sponsor, Sunlight Tax. Apply for our Winter Exhibition: Deadline is November 15: ...
info_outlineI Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Gwen Strahle is a painter living and working in northeast CT. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. She shows her work at Nancy Devine Gallery in RI. Strahle has received several awards including the Connecticut Artist Fellowship, the Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Honorarium from the Drawing Center. Strahle earned her MFA from Yale University in 1983. "I have been making paintings of objects arranged on my studio table for over forty years. Many of the objects in my work have been with me for the entirety of that...
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In this episode, I touch on mystery in art—the space between knowing and not knowing that drives us to create and share Philip Guston’s essay “Faith, Hope, and Impossibility”. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility- Philip Guston “There are so many things in the world—in the cities—so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the...
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Madge Evers (b. 1961, Norwalk, CT) explores the transformative cycles of dormancy, decay, and ecstatic growth in plant life. Her work combines alternative photography, mushroom spores, and painting to depict landscape details and imagined flora. Evers earned a BA from Suffolk University in Boston and an MA from the University of Rhode Island. Her work has been exhibited at the New Britain Museum of American Art (CT), Danforth Museum of Art (Framingham, MA), Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (VT), and the Zero Art Fair (New York, NY), among others. In 2024, she curated and exhibited in the...
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Hannah Cole is a tax expert who specializes in working with self-employed people, especially creative and mission-driven ones. A long-time working artist herself, she’s helped tens of thousands of self-employed people skill up with accessible tax and money education, through her Money Bootcamp program, tax workshops from Florida to Alaska, and on the Sunlight Tax podcast. Her forthcoming book, Taxes for Humans: Simplify Your Taxes and Change the World When You’re Self-Employed, is the most funny and empowering tax guide you’ll ever read. Hannah is the founder of Sunlight Tax. LINKS:...
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Joe Wardwell is currently a Professor of Painting at Brandeis University (Waltham, MA) and is the founder the Brandeis-in-Siena program. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). He received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Boston University (Boston, MA). Currently on view, Wardwell has a large-scale wall drawing, “Hello America: 40 Hits from the 50 States,” commissioned for the renovation of building 6 at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA. In 2022, he completed his first large scale public art...
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In this mini episode of I Like Your Work, I'm talking about the myths and limiting beliefs that often hold artists back. I'm also exploring the importance of building stability and confidence as an artist by challenging outdated tropes and taking small, proactive steps toward the life and practice you want. I Like Your Work Links: Thank you to our Sponsor, Rise and Repaint. Ever wish your biggest career questions actually had answers? Like — Am I pricing my art right? or What do galleries and curators really want to see? That’s exactly what you’ll...
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Susan Klein is an artist living in Charleston, SC. Recent exhibitions include I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws at the Wassaic Project, A Window Scrubbed for the Moon at Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC, and Volcano Lovers at Frontviews, Berlin. Klein is a 2020-2021 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Other awards include an Artist-in-Residence at the Dunedin School of Art in New Zealand, a Hambidge Center Residency, Watershed Center for Ceramics Art Residency, Wassaic Project Residency, residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, a full fellowship to the...
info_outlineI Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
In this mini episode of I Like Your Work, I explore the superpower artists share: our ability to create alternative spaces and community. From non-traditional classrooms and DIY galleries to zines and podcasts, these platforms expand the art ecosystem. As artists, our superpower is creating the spaces we wish existed. When we act, we make room for others, build community, and keep the art world vibrant. I Like Your Work Links: Join the Works Membership! Watch our Youtube channel: Interviews Say “hi” on
info_outlineI Like Your Work: Conversations with Artists
Sam King has exhibited at galleries, artist-run spaces, and universities across the country, including The Painting Center (NYC), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati), Oneoneone Gallery (Chapel Hill), Laconia Gallery (Boston), The Provincial (Kaleva, MI), Living Arts of Tulsa, MIXD (Rogers, AR), the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Tulsa, Lower Columbia College, and Western Connecticut State University. In 2020, King was a resident of Hambidge Center, supported by the Lee and Margaret Echols fellowship for musicians (he records and performs...
info_outlineSam King has exhibited at galleries, artist-run spaces, and universities across the country, including The Painting Center (NYC), Unrequited Leisure (Nashville), Manifest Gallery (Cincinnati), Oneoneone Gallery (Chapel Hill), Laconia Gallery (Boston), The Provincial (Kaleva, MI), Living Arts of Tulsa, MIXD (Rogers, AR), the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Tulsa, Lower Columbia College, and Western Connecticut State University. In 2020, King was a resident of Hambidge Center, supported by the Lee and Margaret Echols fellowship for musicians (he records and performs improvisational, microtonal guitar music under the name Untight). In 2019, he curated Shelters, Monuments, featuring the work of artists Whiting Tennis and Sarah Norsworthy, for The Provincial, an artist-run space in Kaleva, MI. With Christopher Lowrance, King co-founded MW Capacity, a website devoted primarily to painting in the Midwest. With Stephanie Pierce, he co-founded Lalaland, a DIY community projects space in Fayetteville, AR, active 2011-2019. He has also been a resident artist at Vermont Studio Center and Ox-Bow School of Art, an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome, and a recipient of the Arkansas Arts Council’s Individual Artist Fellowship. His work is held in a number of public and private collections. King earned a Bachelor Fine Arts degree from the University of Tulsa (2003) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Indiana University (2005). He resides in Fayetteville, AR, where he serves as an Associate Director of the University of Arkansas School of Art.
"Much of the meaning of my work is embedded in its physicality, process, and composition. I am enamored of the material trappings of painting: not just paint and canvas, but staple-holes, tears, creases, and off-cuts, and at times, the artifacts of digital and hybrid formats. My process is improvisational, and I tend to work on a lot of paintings at once. If a painting is not going well (or it was at one point "finished," and no longer seems sufficiently resolved), I take it off its stretchers, cut it up, and use the pieces to start new works. In this way, a single, failing painting might be the germ of five or ten new ones. By alternatingly reinforcing and transgressing conventions of visual perception, I hope to engage, perhaps even implicate, the viewer in the work. I arrived at this method of making art after years of experimentation and interrogation of painting as a vehicle for communication. I rarely seek out source material, in the sense of a specific painting serving to record a particular scene, moment, or emotion, but also, I think of painting in terms of metaphor and embodiment. My work tends to exist in a suspended, liminal state, like something is there to be recognized, reassembled, or decoded. I can't quite say why I started working this way, but I've indulged a persistent, gnawing instinct to rework old paintings for many years, long before they look like they do now. There is something in them, for me, about the interconnectedness and malleability of our collective and individual experiences, tensions between structure and intuition, and the slipperiness of time, narrative, memory, and interpretation."
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