“The Avenger: Paintings turn pop culture on its ear”

Anne Crump
The San Francisco Examiner
December 2, 2002

Isabel Samaras was born in New York City, grew up in Arlington, Va., and moved back to New York after high school to attend Parsons School of Design, where she majored in illustration. 

A San Francisco resident for the last 10 years, she continues to work as an illustrator, in addition to creating fine art.

You can see more of her work on her Website (www.devilbabe.com) and in “Sci-Fi/Western Show” opening next month at 111 Minna Gallery (111 Minna St., San Francisco; 415-974-1719; www.111minna.org).

Getting Started

“Fitting in wasn’t an option,” says Isabel Samaras, describing herself as a punk outcast in her suburban Virginia high school. So she decided to take her “wacky” side to the extreme, shaving her head, spending weekends in New York, and delving into her art.

“I never considered being anything else but an artist.”

She enrolled at Parsons intending to become a printmaker, but when she discovered printmaking wasn’t offered as a major, she chose illustration, a practical trade that would allow her to study drawing, design and printmaking. But she found the illustration program restrictive and several times considered dropping out to pursue Egyptology, sharks or oceanography. Each time, her mother convinced her to stay in school.

“I tried to do what I wanted to do while convincing my teachers that I was doing what they wanted me to do,” she says. She took fine art classes on the sly and imbued her illustration projects with elements of fine art painting and installation.

She stayed in New York for 10 years after completing school, doing illustrations, working for artists and running programs for a nonprofit installation performance art space. Eventually, she submitted slides of three erotic, superhero-themed lunch boxes she had painted to a gallery, and a successful exhibition there officially kicked off her career as a painter.

On theme

Her longstanding interest in female peril and empowerment, TV-related pop culture, and Italian master paintings led Samaras to an extremely detailed painting style and a focus on TV icons, generally in erotic scenarios, often riffing on historical paintings.

Samaras’ lunch boxes depict Catwoman, Batgirl and Batman in humorous, “fairly sexy, quasi-pornographic positions, juxtaposing elements of childhood and adulthood and attempting to destigmatize porn.

Her more recent paintings go a step farther, re-telling forgotten parables from bygone eras using characters that have a modern resonance, as well as their own mythologies – characters from popular TV shows like “The Avengers,” “The Addams Family,” “Star Trek,” “Bewitched,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Munsters,” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.”

“On old TV shows, there is a denial of sexual appeal,” she says, adding that women often are denied simple pleasures – “Bewitched’s” Darrin wont let Samantha use magic to perform domestic chores; “I Dream of Jeannie’s” skimpily dressed heroine is kept in a bottle and must answer to her “Master.”

But the tables are turned in Samaras’ paintings.

“It works as contemporary mythology because we all know the stories,” she says, noting that Nick at Nite and TV Land have helped familiarize a new generation with now-defunct programs.

On medium

In addition to providing a smooth, impermeable surface, metal lunch boxes and TV trays are particularly suited for Samaras’ paintings because the objects themselves represent childhood nostalgia and popular culture. 
Recently, though, she began working on Masonite, which offers the same smooth, hard surface, but gives her more flexibility with dimensions. Today she’s painting larger pieces influenced by large master works she’s been drawn to during visits to Italy.

The shift to Masonite corresponds to a move from acrylics to oil paints. The acrylics worked well for her meticulously detailed style because they dried quickly, but Samaras said she realized she was spending a lot of time trying to give acrylics the richness, depth and colors characteristic of oil paints.
Plus, the master painters she admires achieved detail using oils, so she figured she could too.

“I needed to do this myself because I need to grow as a person and an artist.”