Ampersand: Meet Sam

When did you start doing art or painting specifically?

I’ve been doing art literally since I was a kid and able to hold a crayon. My parents kept encouraging me, they’re like, “Sam you got this! Your drawings are so good, don’t quit.” I just kept drawing and drawing and drawing. I would only draw with pencil and markers and colored pencils. It wasn’t until really 2018 that I started picking up painting.

What's your typical medium?

A: I’m used to working with acrylic paint. But lately I’ve been experimenting with oil paints, and I’m starting to like them better, just because of how they work.

Do you have anything that you find yourself gravitating towards, in terms of subject matter or thematic things in your work?

If you look at the majority of my paintings, they all somehow include red. I just really like the color. I can’t really say there’s a cohesive theme; I tend to focus on more personal things, just things that happened to me and around me, and I like incorporating that into my art.

Can you walk through your process of making a piece?

So I would start off by toning the canvas, usually with whatever color I feel like using that day. However, through this painting, I learned that not every color is good as a wash, especially if you don’t let it 100% dry first. Yellow tends to be the best. Red if you’re going for a nice, warm tone. And then I would use that same oil and do a rough sketch of where I wanted the main subject matter to be on the canvas. Then I would start off with putting in the darkest colors first, because I find it to be easiest. I highly recommend using a reference image or just a reference. I would continue going up the value level using lighter colors. Personally I like blending everything. Then after the main subject is done, I would go in and do the background.

What is your piece called?

Okay, so, the theme of the painting is infatuation, so what if I call it infatuation? And just left it at that? Or if there’s another word for obsessive infatuation. Let’s see. Limerence. Oh, it’s a disorder. Fun. “Limerence is a state of mind which results from romantic or non romantic feelings for another person. Includes obsessive thoughts and fantasies.” I’ll call it Limerence. Because that sounds fancy.

So tell me a little bit about Limerence.

The piece is actually a sequel to a previous drawing. [The drawing] depicted a female laying on the ground wearing a flower dress, but she had roses in her eyes. The roses are meant to symbolize essentially, rose colored lenses, and being clouded by love, and only being able to see that. And over time, [Limerence], show[s] the flowers got to the point where they essentially took over, and vines started growing and just became this painful constricting thing. It’s supposed to symbolize being infatuated and if you let it go unchecked, it can become toxic and a really unhealthy dangerous thing.

So, how do you decide when a painting is finished?

That’s a really good question. Painting is a process. I kind of see it as a puzzle, figuring out where the different colors piece together on a painting. I just keep doing that until it looks right to me. I don’t know how else to say it besides until I think it looks right.

Do you have any final thoughts for artists out there?

Practice. Practicing–you’ve probably heard this a million times. But, if you want to get good at something, just keep doing it over and over and over again until you get it. I can attribute that to so many things besides painting. This is a really dumb example, but I recently got Smash Bros for the Switch, right? There was this one level that I just couldn’t beat and was so freaking difficult. I would just sit there [re]playing the level and just could not beat it. But then, after like 40 attempts, I finally managed to beat it. I started painting and it wasn’t good, but I just kept painting and painting. So just do it over and over and over again until you like it.

"Limerence," by Sam Berman '23