Samantha was born in the USA, and grew up in England and France. She now lives in London, England, with her daughter Pippa.

 

Formal training in drawing and analytical painting was received at the Academie Julian in Paris. Whilst there, she also heard lectures on history of art, and was introduced to life drawing and working from the figure. This latter was later pursued through a course in figurative sculpture at the City Literary Institute, whilst simultaneously studying for an MA in Drama at King's College London in association with RADA.

In 2002, she completed a PGCE in Art and Design at Cambridge.

 

Samantha started writing at 13. Thoughts, ideas, and observations have taken the shape of many poems, a play, three stories for children and two travel journals. Today she is developing her work in poetry and performance, and can be heard participating in Live Poetry events.

 

Samantha attended the Festival of Healing at the Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1998, where she was introduced to Reiki. She was initiated into First Degree in October of the same year. In March 2000, she was initiated into Second Degree, and later that year received the Master Attunement.

Samantha has been a member of an active Reiki community in south-west London for the past four years, and practices in the Usui Shiki Ryoho tradition.

 

 

In Her Own Words

 

From the age of four, I was aware I wanted to be an artist. Though my family was not artistic, I was introduced to museums and exhibitions from a very early age. I owe much of my passion for art to other artists, and over the years, I have admired, absorbed, and been inspired by their work.

 

Through his life's career, his whole-hearted commitment to painting, his prolific energy, his conviction, Van Gogh teaches me never to give up and to believe. I really hope he now knows that he was right, that his paintings are today known by a multitude, that his sunflowers beam down as dramatically upon the guests of a tiny posada in Venezuela as upon the clients of the Hilton in Vienna. 

I am galvanised by the beautiful botanical work of Margaret Mee, by her intrepid spirit and her love of the Amazon, and delighted by her diary writing.

In Florence, I fell in love when I turned the corner in the Accademia, and saw Michelangelo's David for the first time. I was 17. Michelangelo. He's BIG.

I am indelibly drawn to the sculptures of Rodin and Camille Claudel, which to me pulse life, feeling, humanity, and beauty. My sculptural aspirations are imbued of them.

My romantic nature revels in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, and I am enlivened by their exquisite technical skill. I cried real tears when I came upon Frederic Leighton's Cymon and Iphigenia quite by chance, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Australia.

I am moved and enlivened by the sensuality, individuality, and guts respectively of the Austrians Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser.

Yves Klein's Blue Monochromes, his determined search for the right hue of ultramarine, and his undaunted, avant-garde belief in pure colour leaves me gob-smacked and enthused.

I prize Brancusi's sense of purity, thank Anthony Gormley for his Angel of the North, and am fascinated by Ron Mueck's phenomenal skill and unnerving use of scale.

 

I love museums and art galleries, and feel safe in their open spaces, sacred in their dedication to honouring human expression in its visual and tactile form. There for me, the calm of permanence and community prevails, as inner and outer worlds are recreated in the common striving of self-expression and the magic of representation. I float into different worlds, epochs, relationships. I feel connected to them and them to me. I travel through places and emotions, those of figures, of the artists, those provoked in me. And when life in its complexity becomes overwhelming, when I feel confused or down, art galleries are places I go and find myself again, in front of the sculptures and the paintings.

 

Art media itself: paint, pastels, inks, charcoal, clay, wire,... stimulate my senses, and I come home amidst the general paraphernalia of an art studio.

The three fields I work in are painting, printmaking and sculpture, the latter being the closest to my heart.

 

An invitation from a friend took me out to Venezuela over Christmas 1995. I had such a wonderful time, I returned the following year to live there. I have been greatly inspired, and am hugely indebted to the country, its landscape, vegetation and people. Its presence in my work is obvious. Aside from the more personal pieces, it was there that I started painting flowers, in particular developing a love of orchids, birds of paradise, the exotic.

 

Writing comes naturally as a means to release the meanderings of my mind, and satisfies a need to communicate. I also enjoy playing with language, and derive pleasure from finding the right rhythm, or phrase to suit the context.

 

From as early as I can remember, in a distinctly ad-hoc manner, I have 'known' things, some of these things being facts of the present, some of them being events due to occur in the future. I didn't think twice about it until 1994, when some things that were due to occur did so in a dramatic enough way for me to realise this was not part of everybody's reality, and to suddenly find myself flooded with questions. Reiki came to me as an aid on a path towards spiritual understanding, bringing with it grounding, peace, acceptance and empowerment, and therewith much healing.