Sam Zaluska is a contemporary modern abstract artist working primarily in oil on canvas. Although self-taught, Sam has studied art history at the University of Ottawa and Carleton University.
All his paintings are original, imaginative, and different, usually composed of urban landscapes with hidden and patterned symbolic images which comment on today’s society while capturing the viewer’s eye with movement and a sense of mystery.
Sam has participated in numerous group shows over the past several years in the National Capital Region where he has lived most of his life. Presently he resides in Gatineau, Quebec.
Read the full Artist's StatementI am a self-taught artist and have created art in various media throughout my life but I began painting in oil, my primary medium, in the summer of 2000.
I draw from a wealth of imagery, styles and traditions from my education in art history but always strive to create original images.
Although I am aware of the traditional rules in art and composing an image I try to deviate from them when I feel it best suits the image I’m creating, and when I believe it’s becoming too similar to “reality”. I do so to contrast against digital images and the ease at which their perfect images are created and have become ubiquitous throughout modern society.
In general, I stay away from things like straight lines, strict perspective techniques, and correct colouring because that way, for me, I truly infuse the “human” part in my images by leaving the technical aids behind. I feel a lot of things are created so perfectly that it’s difficult to truly know the difference between what’s made by hand and what’s made by machine so I exaggerate this difference by way of a “rough” and “unfinished” feel in my works to make it clear that a human hand made the image.
I am a Romantic at heart, and always try to invoke melancholy, or a sense of awe and inspiration in my images, be they a comment on society, urbanism, space, and science. I like to challenge our general perception of the world around us considering the human eye sees so little of the world and universe we live and work in every day (i.e. different light spectrums, multiple dimensions and universes, curved space, etc.). Although the inspiration for my images may be complex I tend to try and connect and draw in viewers by using hidden images, patterns (through colours or lines, etc) and I always try to make an image where the eye cannot easily rest, and tends to want to move about the composition.
My goal with every image I create is to try and create something that has never been created before.
Sam Zaluska,
2014
With the advent of photography and now digital photography and computer manipulated images, what are the roles of the painter and paintings?
My paintings are my physical expressions through the use of colour, composition, intuition, imagination, ambiguity and accident on all subjects ranging from philosophy, politics, space, other dimensions, time, love, passion, and those mysteries the universe has not granted us permission to know.
I always have as my goal to create a painting whose iconography cannot be easily understood or perceived in any sort of immediacy. Those works that can interact with the viewer in their conscious, unconscious, and subconscious minds - over years and throughout time - are, for me, how great art is achieved.
I am an artist of the present who relies on the past to engage the future.
Sam Zaluska,
2008