Artist That Matter : Sam Flores

Here’s an interesting article from Juxtapoz Magazine on Sam Flores; One of our favorite artist out of San Fransisco, Enjoy!

Words and photos by Trina Calderon

Beauty in Trouble (Reign of the Rainbow Goblins) 72” x 48”

Sam Flores is a Juxtapoz household name. I can pretty much guarantee that if he has art showing in your neighborhood, you need to leave your comfortable couch and go take a look! “Ego, Addiction & Other Bedtime Stories” is a dark show laced with Flores’ style beauty and hope.

He came up with the title after bouncing around a few ideas off his friends. “I just wanted to show all these different worlds. The whole idea is balance, and maintaining a balance of light and dark. Showing your demons and angels and everything in between. I’ve been into all these old fables and there’s all these different children’s books designers that I like, so I what I did was take some old drawings of stories and flip them my way. Like Rip Van Winkle and all those kinds of bedtime stories. I take those and twist them to nowadays and the troubles people are dealing with. I wanted to just combine them and use that look in my show.”

Beauty in Trouble (Reign of the Rainbow Goblins) 72” x 48” (Detail)

A self-taught artist, Sam attributes his imagination to his childhood. “I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my Mom and we had no money. We were pretty poor and we moved each month, from apartment to apartment. When I was a boy, I didn’t have toys, so my Mom would give me paper and pencil and I would draw.

“When we didn’t have paper I would draw on all the moving boxes, and we’d keep all the drawings because we never got rid of all the moving boxes. I didn’t have GI Joe and Transformers so I was kind of forced to build my imagination kind of early. I just got into drawing from that, and I knew since I was a kid I wanted to do that. After an art class in high school, that was about it. I never went to college. I just kind of did the self-taught thing.”

The work in this show varies from large paintings to a few screenprints he designed on his computer, to sketches. The December cover of Juxtapoz featured “ReCreation” which was the first painting Sam did for this show. He told me his process to prepare for a show involves cutting off all contact with everyone and pulling 13 hour days in his studio, which he likens to his cave. He doesn’t leave for anything but the gym, Blockbuster, and the store. It takes discipline for great art!

“ReCreation” is a story about beauty. It is a city creating beauty, in the form of a large female, and they are having a festival in the street before they send it off. “They are celebrating that this is where beauty comes from.”

In the last decade Sam has used a female in much of his work. “It’s not a person. A lot of times it represents a thought, an emotion, or like a situation. It’s just a vehicle that I use. One could represent beauty, and each one could represent something different. It’s a vehicle I’ve chosen to house each idea I had for the painting.”

Often he paints his females with exaggerated features, like odd posture or large hands or feet. His background as a graffiti artist has a lot to do with this as well as using the forms to convey a mood. “A lot of the body postures are very withdrawn and tied up and uncomfortable. That is just my commentary on life and people dealing with their surroundings and they are just really withdrawn and enclosed.

“Growing up, it was really hard to draw hands and feet on people, so I would just practice a lot. From all that time of getting up, in graffiti style, those characters would have big hands and big feet and little heads, so I started doing crossover work mixed with that style. I like having a character that there’s not a lot of expression on their face. You can really tell a story of what they are feeling, just how their hands are flexed or really intense. That’s the main reason why I do all that.”

Which also explains why the females in his paintings have their eyes closed most of the time. Although, he does have some smaller paintings in this show that have females with open eyes for a change. “This show I wanted them to be more vulnerable and let them into the world. I just wanted them to look like they need help, but they couldn’t ask for it. So, they are vulnerable and self destructive.”

Sam has a real quiet sensitivity about him and I think he is a pretty genuine artist. He has worked hard for a long time on his technique and skills and you can really see it in his work, both technically and emotionally. His work is, for the most part, about what he sees in other people. “I am sure it’s a little bit from me, but it’s not just me and all my issues of what I’m going through. It’s more of a commentary of what I see, and that’s the actual way I can describe it, instead of writing. It’s just my vehicle of showing it.”

His favorite piece in the show is a large painting in the last salon. It’s called “Beauty in Trouble (Reign of the Rainbow Goblins).” It is such a dark and lovely painting and a brilliant show of contrast – light and dark, the goblins above ground and the town hiding the last of their beauty below ground.

Sam uses rainbows to symbolize beauty in many of his paintings, and in this piece the town is literally protecting the various colors of the rainbow because it is the last of the beauty they have left. He told me he got all ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ on this one. “There’s an old book called The Rainbow Goblins and it was one of my favorite books as a kid. I just wanted to twist that idea. Remember that scene in Lord of the Rings, when those little hobbits are hiding under that tree and that big black horse stops above, I kinda got that idea from that too.” It is an awesome painting (72” x 48”).

The show runs through the month, so check it out. In the meantime, Sam is busy. He is working with Montana spray paint to create some art for a can – it’s his favorite color right now, Electric Azul.