Rob Sample

Clayton

Established
Visual Arts: Painting

By: Gail Obenreder

“My work features . . . worlds of wonder, weirdness, and sometimes terror, to remind us all of our universal human roots.”

From childhood, painter Rob Sample always enjoyed drawing, but at eight years old he first picked up a comic book “and instantly fell in love with the power of images to tell a story.” An only child, he was raised by his parents in Parsonsburg, Maryland in a small house on four acres of woods that were completely surrounded by a state forest. As a result, he “spent a lot of time wandering through those woods, lost in my imagination.”

Sample decided to pursue art seriously in his senior year in high school, and he enrolled in Wicomico County’s Visual and Performing Arts Program. There, he was inspired by art teacher Michael Morris, but he says that “the entire VPA program deserves credit. Getting to spend three hours a day around other artists probably saved my high school career.”

Morris encouraged the young painter to attend the University of Delaware, and as well as studying anime and manga, Sample also encountered painters like John Singer Sargent, Frank Frazetta, and Howard Pyle and the Golden Age illustrators.  Those painters “created lands of wonders, and I wanted to do the same.” At UD, he majored in fine arts with a concentration on painting and then enrolled in Towson University’s post-baccalaureate art education program.

After college, Sample began teaching art at Delaware’s Caesar Rodney High School, and he has lived his entire professional life in the First State. Inspired by visual storytelling, his work features figures from “myth and legend . . . anthropomorphic animals like those from Aesop’s Fables, and stories much older,” all of them “carrying messages and wisdom for those who would listen.”

For inspiration, Sample still turns to the masters who captivated him, but Robert Liberace and Roberto Ferri are “two contemporary painters that I think about all the time.” And he’s recently discovered the saturated colors of filmmaker Panos Cosmatos, who (mesmerized by the images on DVD packages) haunted video stores in his youth. “I remember doing the exact same thing.”

Continually searching for authenticity and honesty, Sample reminds himself to “make the work for me, not the viewer.” But that creates a challenge: “I want to connect . . . I want people to understand what I’m doing” without letting external factors totally guide his artistic practice. And he loves “hitting the flow state. Those wonderful moments when I get completely lost in the craft and the task at hand,” unworried about whether a work is on the right path.

Likely due to his upbringing alone in the woods,” Sample loves to be “where people aren’t.” He often seeks uncrowded places like a city in the early morning or the beach in off-season, relishing “the feeling of having somewhere to myself.”

Honored to receive a Fellowship and grateful to the jurors and the Division of the Arts, Sample feels that the award “represents a huge, though daunting, sense of validation.” He intends to use the award to expand his professional practice and his current studio, continuing to create those powerful story-telling images that cut through today’s “mental bombardment” to portray what is “real” over what is “noise.”

 

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