For The Sake Of Making Art
“I am a painter, an artist, a mother, a worker, a curator,” explained Samantha Palmeri when asked to introduce herself. The Hudson Valley artist’s work, “starts from a personal place,” as stated on her website. All these aspects help her create art with meaning and purpose.
As a kid, Palmeri always drew and colored, but in high school, Palmeri began to realize her talent. “I took whatever art class I was supposed to, but I noticed that I was really good at it and my teacher gave me a lot of credit for that, and that appreciation was an award that I wanted to keep going.”
But it wasn’t until college when she realized after some time that she wanted to be an artist. “I always did art things but I never considered myself an artist, and I guess I didn’t have an example of what that actually meant, what a working artist is. So, it wasn’t something I could point to and say, ‘I want to do that.’” After a couple of years at a liberal arts college, and taking every art-related course offered at the school, Palmeri knew that if this was truly a passion for her, she had to make that leap.
To help with her decision, Palmeri knew she had to test herself. So, she took off six months from school, to see if becoming an artist was really something she wanted to do. “For that six months, I woke up every morning and went into my little studio and I worked and I was like ‘Oh yeah! This is what I want to do!’” So at 20 years old, Palmeri transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
After college, Palmeri incorporated art into every aspect of her life; finding and creating artwork as she went along. This is one of the reasons why Palmeri founded The Intersection, an interdisciplinary artist group. “I was living in New Jersey at the time...and there was really zero culture going on around me.” After attending whatever artistic event she could go to, she managed to gather a starting group of 10 individuals all from different places and at different points in their lives, while all being artists in a number of different disciplines from performers to woodworkers to writers. “We called it the intersection because it was just like a crossroads of how did we end up in this place together at the same time.”
The premise of the group for Palmeri was for them to get together to make art purely for the sake of making art. “It was not meant really for the public and it wasn’t meant to sell anything, it wasn’t meant to network...it was really to enjoy the experience for what it was.”
And enjoy the experience they did, as the group created a silent movie in a backyard, created performance pieces, made a side-of-the-road art installation, created music, instruments, and poetry.
When moving to the Hudson Valley, it was a criterion for Palmeri that the location had a vibrant art community. So, with that being at the top of her list, she settled in Beacon, a place full of artistic communities, both private and public.
Yet, being in a community where artists encompassed it made being in lockdown during COVID-19 especially difficult for Palmeri’s work. So, she took a step back and changed her artistic direction a bit. “I usually work on pretty large paintings and I think with the stress from the pandemic I had less focus for the larger works and I started to work on much smaller pieces which is very different for me...my work was very tangled up in my abstract expressionist way before, and then I started to make like stripes and rainbows, kind of like lighter, more colorful things that make me feel good making them.”
This art series is titled “Quarantine Drawings”, with 49 unique drawings encompassing her feelings during the quarantine with works titled “What Now” and “Fill My Cup”. Much of her inspiration comes from, “nature and the body, which I see as the same thing. It’s very organic, my work and usually I am looking at shapes that I am physically observing. It doesn’t just come out of my head.” Her observations are always put into her art, which can be seen in her series called “My Neighbor’s Blinds”.
Palmeri was not the only artist feeling lost during the months of isolation; the whole art community in Beacon felt it. “We are a pretty close-knit art community. We have second Saturdays once a month and for lots of us, that is our social engagement with each other. That’s how we network, that is how we see our artist friends and so without that, there was a lot less conversation about what we were doing...we were all missing each other.”
But, through this darkness, Palmeri has begun to say the rays of hope break through. “I went to an art opening that was pretty packed...that was exciting and a little bit stressful because I wasn’t used to that many people in one room.”
No matter what happens in the future, Samantha Palmeri has three big goals for herself: to keep working, to stay curious, and to keep connecting with other artists within the community. “That is a very simple goal but being so isolated for all this time, it makes a lot more sense to say that now than we used to.”
Samantha Palmeri uses her daily observations as well as nature and her body to create artwork unique to her. Source: Samantha Palmeri (Website and Instagram)