Artist : Sam Lock
Title : As an Arrow 
Medium : mixed media on canvas
Dimensions : 200 x 200 cm


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Sam Lock’s considered and expressive, often large scale, abstract paintings embrace the principle that change is a process not an event. A meditation on the continual flow and movement both around us and within us inspires each gesture. They are not made with a system or fixed process but through an energy that embraces both change and chance, in a manner that is both organic and unscripted, following its own path until there is a balance between presence and absence. There are silences and hiding places that are both poetic and activating, and a physicality and immediacy, where his aim to ‘submit’ himself to the canvas, eliminates extraneous thought in order to guarantee a purity of response. A response arising through concentration and intuition where thought and action, go hand-in-hand. This is what Lock refers to as the ‘poetry of moments’, of the spiritual nature of now becoming then, and how what started as waves of actions, becomes a forest of memory. Lock is interested in marks, resulting in paintings, that communicate both instantly and slowly - to slow down perception, and to create forms that don’t reveal themselves fully, all at once, through a filling up and emptying of space and surface; traces and echoes exist in a palimpsest, a build-up of painted marks, layers and statements that conceal and reveal, where time becomes held in a concrete way and the painting achieves a physical weight and substance. These layers allow you to swim in and out of the painting, they lead back in time, retaining a mystery and dynamism of the moment rather than a recollection of a misty lost past.

Sam Lock was born in London and now lives and works near Brighton with his studio in a converted industrial unit further up the coast.  Lock studied at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University, graduating in 1997 with MA’s in both Fine Art and Art History. During his training, he won a scholarship to travel to Rome, and explore the relationship between history, archaeology and the processes of painting, a preoccupation which still forms the conceptual basis that underpins his practice.