THE ARTIST LIFE: Isabel Samaras
By Sherri Cullison

International Tattoo Art Magazine - May 2003

She wakes up to have breakfast with Marcos, her other half, and Nico, her two year old. Marcos leaves for his studio. Nico goes to daycare. She chews the last of her food and stares at today’s painting. The phone rings. Being the screen queen, she doesn’t pick up, but instead listens. She considers herself lucky not to have videophones because then someone might see her in pajamas and with the massive tangle of bed-head she’s sporting. A few hours pass as she paints. Around lunchtime, still in her pajamas, she offers a thumbs-up to the gods for allowing her this life. The Fed Ex guy has seen every pair of paint-spattered pajamas that she owns, and he never smirks. She swears by Fed Ex.

She sneaks into the kitchen for a snack, then returns to her paints. Everything was going smooth until this re-entry. She realizes she’s completely screwed something up. There’s a spot that’s beyond all repair. She begins to question why she thought she could ever paint in the first place: there’s nothing to lose now. She jumps back in, ready to delivery the knockout punch. Hours pass, and the sun starts to set. Marcos and Nico return home. She takes a step back and considers the painting not so bad after all. In fact, it has some really great aspects. Time, then, for a celebratory snack of some Newman’s Own Mint O’s cookies. She chews on a cookie, rinses out her brushes, sings a merry tune, and heads into the other room to spend a little time with her husband and son. Later, when they drift off to sleep, she shuffles back into the studio for another round with the brushes.

This is San Francisco-based Isabel Samaras’ not-so-glamorous artist life. It’s an amazing thing what a gal can do with oils, talent, a head full of ideas and a comfy pair of pajamas.

Growing up a latchkey kid with a single mom, Isabel also spent much of her youth at home alone. As a child, she was watching television sitcoms, creating paper dolls and drawing. When her early teachers had begun pushing their students to take more serious subjects like reading, writing and arithmetic, Isabel steadfastly refused to give up her crayons. Even as a child, when elders asked Isabel if she was going to be an artist when she grew up, her instant answer was always yes.

The artist life has been hers for years now. Isabel has built a healthy reputation in the business of art, which continues to morph and grow on a daily basis. Well-known for her fascination with 60s and 70s television sitcom characters, and now her later obsessions with old master paintings and Roman and Greek mythology, Isabel has painted her way through several transformations as an artist. First she was known for adorning lunch boxes with television characters acting out their forbidden fantasies. It was the stuff that none of us had ever seen on TV. But Isabel had long-since been entranced with the idea of unrequited love, and she was the first to offer images of these unspoken loves taken from the television waves. The unique and immediate ribald humor of her art made the works an instant success.

In the early 90s, Isabel picked up and moved from New York to San Francisco with her husband, and the new locale brought another change: her materials. She began painting on tin television trays: appropriate, since she more-often-than-not ate off of them as a child. The kitchiness of the trays, like the earlier lunch boxes, was also a hit. Past the initial giggle-effect of her imagery, though, Isabel’s skill in recreating these popular characters in naughty situations was getting noticed.

With the television trays came yet another transition. Isabel began to source Old Master paintings for the primary basis for her trays, while continuing to use the television characters in these new settings. She was redefining the look and feel of some of her favorite influences, using the same compositions, but modernizing the subject matter by adding a big dose of her favorite book-tube fodder.  Isabel’s painting, “The Raft of the Minnow,” for example, was based on Gerricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” which was about a shipwrecked crew that turned to cannibalism to survive. The painting was a perfect fit with the cast of Gilligan’s Island.

“To be perfectly honest I’m not even sure what odd little synapse clicked that one into place,” Isabel said. “I think I just looked at the painting one day and saw this other version of it in my mind. Then I didn’t even think about masters for a while, until I did ‘Forever,’ a painting of Catwoman getting the Batman symbol tattooed onto her sacrum, and that was mostly because I was noticing how funny these old Boucher paintings were, where the man was obsessed with women’s asses. All these women plumped up on pillows and cushions with their butts in the air, it was great stuff.” That went along, she said, with her long-standing assumption that Batman and Catwoman “have… you know… unfinished business.”

After “Forever,” Isabel started swimming in the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo artistic seas. “I just kept thinking about how when these paintings were originally done, the characters in them were known and obvious to the viewers, and sometimes going to view these paintings would be a big social event, like our going to a movie now,” she said. “But a lot of the mythology and biblical stories behind the paintings were lost on my generation; it wasn’t something we were steeping in. What I had a lot of knowledge of was the vast amounts of television I’d watched as a kid, so I started re-imagining all these classical images with new casts of characters, showing glimpses of a different relationship than the one we’d all seen on screen. It was also about the idea of a public persona versus a real, hidden one.”

For almost ten years, the self-framing television trays were the perfect vehicle for Isabel to display her ideas. She also branched out into painting Carom boards, which offered her the same resonance of childhood that she could then recast into her characteristic un-childlike paintings. However, after so many years of painting on tin trays, “they started to feel like a prison,” Isabel said. “I had ideas that didn’t want to be 16 x 20 inches; they didn’t want to be rectangular; they didn’t want to be on a TV tray. Also, with all these paintings referencing old master paintings, I really wanted to see them in the kind of wonderfully ludicrous Baroque frames they deserved.”

Up until then, Isabel had always used acrylics, and her co-conspirators in art were gently nudging her to make a switch to oils. A trip to Italy sealed the deal. “I’d be standing in the Uffizi, staring, with my jaw on the floor and my eyeballs rolling around in their sockets, at these incredible painting,” she said. “I realized that I was really drawn to things that were bigger because they had a different impact, a presence that I wasn’t able to do within a size restriction. So I came back determined to break free from my petite tin prison. I ran out and bought a ton of oil paint. Then I got pregnant and couldn’t touch the stuff for a year.”

But the year she was only allowed to ponder the switch to oils worked out well. “I had some time to tinker my ideas around with the acrylics and when I finally hit the oils, it just came pouring out,” Isabel said. “Each piece was bigger than the previous one until I was painting these 24 x 36 inch pieces, which I realize doesn’t sound big, but to me, it was massive. I loved it. I was able to do a painting of [I Dream of] Jeannie where she was basically life-sized. The piece has a kind of impact the image never could have had on a TV tray.”

Large or small, there are common themes that have never ceased to run through Isabel’s work, from the lunch boxes and TV trays to the grandiose oil paintings. There is forbidden passion, unrequited love, lust and longing, secrets, myths, and fiercely sexy women, along with the men, women and monsters who love them.