Samantha Thomas

Handwoven cotton thread, acrylic, gouache, and pastel on linen, artist frame 98" x 73.75"

Acrylic on canvas over panel 53” x 53”

Handwoven cotton thread and gouache on canvas, artist frame 62.5” x 86”

Handwoven cotton thread and acrylic on linen, artist frame 74” x 38”

Handwoven cotton thread and acrylic on linen 72” x 60”

Acrylic on canvas over panel 66” x 66”

Handwoven cotton thread on canvas, artist frame 68” x 56”

Handwoven cotton thread and gouache on linen, artist frame 73.5” x 52.25”

Handwoven cotton thread on canvas, artist frame 33.75” x 21.5”

Acrylic on linen, artist frame 25.75” x 21”

Handwoven cotton thread and acrylic on linen, artist frame 22” x 18”

Handwoven cotton thread on linen Framed 21 3⁄4" x 17 1⁄2" x 1 1⁄2"

Handwoven cotton thread and acrylic on linen, artist frame 33.75” x 33.75”

Handwoven cotton thread and acrylic on linen, artist frame 14.75” x 11.5”

Handwoven cotton thread and gouache on linen, artist frame 14 3⁄4" x 11 1⁄2" x 1 1⁄2"

Handwoven cotton thread on burlap and cotton linen, artist frame 14 3⁄4" x 11 1⁄2" x 1 1⁄2"

Samantha Thomas’ works are steeped in the canon of painting while actively engaging in multiple disciplines. Her new series of work, entitled Texture/Parameter, marks a continued exploration with the limits of the traditional canvas. Thomas’ exercises in spatial concerns are informed by landscape and our proximity to it. Her art is a means to explore the “place” of the painting, to use the artist’s words. Foreground and background are conceived not by imposing perspective but by building out the materiality of the canvas, occasionally exaggerating core structural components. These assemblage works fit into the scheme of the picture plane that serve as analogies for how the physical and the psychological inform one other as distinct realms of experience. Texture/Parameter builds on a unique approach that seeks the architecture and sculptural form in abstraction.

Archetypal Pattern 2013  acrylic, wool, and thread  80 inches circumference 

Landscapification #6 2012-2013  thread on canvas 72 1/2 x 60 x 4 1/2 inches

Texture/Parameter #10 2012 dyed rope on canvas 18 x 15 x 5 inches

Texture/Parameter #1 2012 acrylic, oil and linen over panel 24 x 24 x 5 inches     

Texture/Parameter #12 2013 canvas and egg crate over panel on wood  20 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches

Texture/Parameter #20 2013 canvas and oil on linen 18 x 15 inches 

.Texture/Parameter #21 2013 burlap, thread, canvas, and spray paint on linen 28 x 20 inches

Texture/Parameter #22 2013 acrylic, oil, and burlap on linen 20 x 15 inches 

Texture/Parameter # 7 2012 linen, thread, and acrylic on canvas 28 x 17 x 8 inches

Texture/Parameter #17 2013 rope, thread, acrylic and oil on canvas 15 x 12 x 3 inches

Texture/Parameter #24 2013 acrylic and oil on linen over panel 18 x 11 x 4 3/4 inches

Texture/Parameter #11 2013 acrylic on linen 14 1/4 x 11 x 4 1/2 inches

 Texture/Parameter #15 2013 acrylic, rope, and oil on canvas 11 1/2 x 10 inches 

Texture/Parameter #18 2013 thread on canvas 12 x 11 inches

Texture/Parameter #16 2013 acrylic and oil on linen 16 1/2 x 11 x 2 1/2 inches

Texture/Parameter #2 2012 acrylic and oil on burlap 14 x 11 inches

Texture/Parameter #9 2012 rope, thread, and oil on linen 12 1/4 x 10 inches

Texture/Parameter #3 2012 oil on linen 14 x 11 x 3 inches

Texture/Parameter #5 2012 thread and oil on burlap 12 1/4 x 10 inches

Texture/Parameter #13 2013 thread and burlap on linen 8 x 10 x 1 1/2 inches 

Texture/Parameter #19 2013 acrylic, spray paint, thread, and burlap on linen 8 x 10 x 1 1/2 inches

Texture/Parameter #26 2013 acrylic and oil on linen over panel              

Texture/Parameter #17 2013 rope, thread, acrylic and oil on canvas 15 x 12 x 3 inches

Texture/Parameter #25 2011-12 thread and burlap

Texture/Parameter #23 2013 thread and linen on board framed 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

Texture/Parameter #6 2012 acrylic and oil on linen 20 x 16 x 8 1/4 inches

Texture/Parameter #4 2012 linen and thread on wool 14 x 11 x 4 inches

Texture/Parameter #8 2012 acrylic and oil on linen 12 x 10 x 6 inches

Abstract painting's meteoric rise to the sine qua non of modern art history was less linear than erratic, a trajectory aptly charted earlier this year in MoMA's "Inventing Abstraction." If such grand surveys aim to reveal the history of a period by mapping it expansively, Los Angeles - based artist Samantha Thomas mines the canon of abstraction by working intensively, creating canvases that quote from a century-long history of modern art while questioning some its most hallowed assumptions through a sly use of materials.  
The works (all 2013) in Thomas's exhibition "Texture/Parameter" were mostly easel-size and installed salon-style on one wall, with two larger pieces nearby. They venture down a path of familiar citations: actual tangled and matted yarn alludes to Pollock's skeins, a tilted frame conjures Mondrian's lozenges, a vertical band pays homage to Newman's zips. The artist's most explicit interlocutor is Kazimir Malevich, whose early 20th-century Suprematist paintings of nearly monochromatic squares--each offset just enough so as not to merely echo the canvases' shape, but rather to exist as an autonomous form--became the stuff of avant-garde legend. Today, the once-austere surfaces of Malevich's squares--especially the famous black ones--are cracking; the deleterious effects of corrosion and decay have qualified the work's promise of truth as embodied in geometry. Thomas intimates as much in two works, each the chromatic inversion of Malevich's black-on-white schema. The raw canvas of Texture/Parameter #12 hides an egg carton, resulting in a bulging, spectral grid. Texture/Parameter #20 is plagued with holes, the result of the canvas having been burned.  
While some narratives of abstract art celebrate the purging of figural references in favor of pure line and color, Thomas's work strongly suggests the body in a variety of ways. After all, latent within proposed narratives of abstraction's purely "optical" experimentation was always its shadowy other: the sense of touch. For Thomas, the canvas is far from flat, and materials form an entry point for testing a range of textures. In some pieces, oil and acrylic are built up and smoothed over so as to take on a quality of vinyl or latex. In addition to creating these more synthetic effects, Thomas is persistent in her use of coarse vegetable fibers: burlap, linen, and rope. 
Several cruciform reliefs appear wilted and slightly slouching, evoking not universal language of forms, but rather the course of gravity and age. Elsewhere, the canvases seem to sprout appendages. In Texture/Parameter #2, vertical bands of vermillion flank a section of burlap, its raised seam suggesting both the bumpy flesh of scar tissue and the curvature of the human spine. Thomas's vocabulary of orifices and sineway coils, conjuring Eva Hesse and others, invites further bodily associations: a bulky girth of rope becomes entrails, the creasing and wrinkles of linen a protruding navel.  
Ambitious in scope, "Texture/Parameter" portended to take on a modernist art history, but it most successfully considers the temporality of a distinctly bodily register: the rhythms of fecundity and rot. Thomas seems to understand that exploring abstraction's parameters is less about interdicting the possibilities of canvas than marshaling its excesses.

----Catherine Damman

For an abstract painter whose career has twinned engagement with modern art history and the mysteries of nature, Samantha Thomas is getting ready to show new paintings made entirely by starting over. Working equally in pigment and in thread in such a way as to highlight the heft of the canvas in its waves, weaves, and folds as much as the optical patterns in her newly bright color stories, Thomas plays with form and feeling, architecture and affect, depth of space and delight in craft. When her latest exhibition opens this weekend at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles, it will be her first in the nearly six years since her home and studio were destroyed in the Woolsey Fire in 2018—and her close-call escape from the inferno with nothing but her dog and the clothes she was wearing. The suite of large, energetic paintings reflect a return to the bright side for the artist, a Phoenix-like path back to joy in both art and nature, that shines out from the deep folds and luminous colors of her abstract topographies.

Where was the most magical moon you’ve ever observed?

As a self-described Moon Mystic, there is no one moon I can single out—but many I would describe as magical. I find it to be most awe inspiring and when it is full, I often find myself chasing it, creating some ritual experience to fully embrace its energetic powers. Lighting a bonfire on the beach, surfing as is rises into the nights sky, or pulling out my telescope to zero in on its violently textured surface are just some ways I honor the phenomenon and harness its energy. It is possibly the closest thing I encounter to a spiritual experience, often asking it questions filled with hope, guidance, and embracing the change that it brings. Whether it’s peaking through a skyline, illuminating a desolate landscape, or watching it shimmer on top of the water as it’s pushing and pulling the tides, I am gravitationally pulled to find it and experience its wonderment with fresh eyes.

On a visit to Samantha Thomas’s Los Angeles studio last month, I got a sneak peek at her new body of work—a series of paintings that are wonderfully joyful. In fact, the delightfully refreshing works squash any qualms about the conceptual depth of happy art.

Thomas intends these works, which are currently on view in her solo show “Chromoception” at Anat Ebgi, to be read as paintings, but they’re actually made by painstakingly weaving embroidery thread into canvas. Thomas concocted this method by almost turning her canvases into looms. She draws on her longstanding interest in Arte Povera, though the pieces also recall the work of Anni Albers and ancient Andean weaving traditions. The works resemble sliced-up sunsets or otherworldly landscapes—the rainbow mountains of Vinicunca, Peru, were an inspiration. This particular work is a prime example, relishing in the rush of bold color and the calm of crisp canvas.

—Casey Lesser, Editor in Chief & Director of Content

LANDSCAPIFICATION #1, 2011
66 x 54 inches, Acrylic, oil and enamel on linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #3, 2012
72 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil and thread on linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #4, 2012
60 x 48 inches, Acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #8, 2013
72 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #9, 2013
52 x 48 inches, Dyed linen, thread, acrylic, and spray paint on linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #10, 2013
75 x 60 inches, Thread, wood, acrylic, and spray paint on linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #11, 2013
63 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil, canvas, and burlap over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #12, 2013
52 x 43 inches, Acrylic and thread on canvas framed

LANDSCAPIFICATION #13, 2013
60 x 48 inches, Acrylic, thread, oil on canvas and linen over panel

LANDSCAPIFICATION #14, 2013
52 x 43 inches, Thread, acrylic, and oil on linen over panel