Vicious, Delicious & Ambitious: 20th Century Women Artists
Sherri Cullison
Publ. By Shiffer Design Books
2003

Isabel Samaras wants to make your eyes water. She wants people to see her paintings as a process similar to the peeling away of layers of an onion. When you get to the core, it will start the burn. At least that’s what she’d like.

Isabel paints 70s sitcom characters doing the naughty things we never saw them do on television. She’s become well known for her scandalous lunch boxes and television trays boasting images like Catwoman and Batman making it and Jeannie from “I Dream of Jeannie” wearing less than her customary harem wear.

But there’s more to her art than that. Old master paintings light Isabel’s fire. We’re talking specifically of artists like Annibale Carracci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, Caravaggio, Agnolo Bronzino, and Jacopo Pontormo. What most people don’t get is that Isabel’s art, hidden behind the façade of easily identifiable television characters, is just as much about the old masters as it is about Isabel painting the Skipper giving it to Gilligan good.

Isabel’s paintings are layered. First you see a naked lady. Then you recognize the naked lady as Jeannie. Next you realize the Jeannie painting is based on an Ingres painting. Often the paintings she is referencing will trace further back to old biblical stories. “I have these personal little stories I want to tell, and I’m using these characters the same way people were using Biblical and mythological characters in the past,” she said.

“The great thing about working from master paintings is they really knew what they were doing,” Isabel said. “They made these paintings, these compositions and colors for a real good reason. There’s so much going on in there, and its really wonderful to re-experience them from the inside out.”
Her beginnings in art are much like other artists. She always liked to draw, and she recalls her mother making her fabulous paper doll sets. “She made a mermaid family and this really cool black family who all had afros,” Isabel said. “They were the best. I know for a fact that my early impetus to try and draw better was to be able to match her drawing skill and do what she was doing. She could create fantasy out of paper and pen. It was completely seductive.”

Isabel grew up making those paper dolls in Arlington, Virginia, but she left as son as she could for New York City and Parsons School of Design. Although she was most interested in going into printmaking, Parsons didn’t offer a printmaking major. She spontaneously chose illustration instead, thinking it would offer her a well-rounded education in drawing and painting, as well as a little in printmaking. By the time she graduated, however, she wanted nothing to do with illustration.

The luck of the draw, though, landed her a job right out of college illustrating a cookbook. While in college, she’d picked up an interest in oceanography and had spent a major portion of her college career drawing fish, sharks and other sea creatures. The cookbook called for drawings of seafood. The job was hers.

With the large pile of money she made from the job, Isabel ran off to Italy where she said she looked at “real art” for a month. She returned to New York and started painting large canvases of symbolist work in the vein of the Pre-Raphaelites. “I was doing a lot of dream imagery, these red-haired women in various scenes of odd imperilment,” she said.

Then one day she decided to paint a lunch box. It was meant as a joke, and the imagery she hoped to paint reverted back to her days of watching television. “I think as a kid I was really frustrated with these dorky things that never turned up on these TV shows. Batman never got to kiss Catwoman. That was just ridiculous because they obviously loved each other. With Jeannie, you’ve got this incredibly gorgeous half-naked genie, and she would do just anything,” Isabel said. “Those things plagued me.”

Unrequited love, and the satisfaction of that love’s eventual requiting, is the common thread that runs through most of Isabel’s work. As a child, Isabel saw forbidden lovers on her television set. As an adult, Isabel had her say, and with her lunchbox art, those forbidden lovers were finally able to seal the deal. “I obtained the skill to force into a two-dimensional reality these things that I had been thinking about since I was a kid,” she said. “The lunch boxes became these childhood TV characters in these incredibly adult situations. The first one came out really well, and I thought I can’t stop at that now.” Along with the first lunch box came ideas for a gang of others, including depictions of the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the Addams Family.

Over time, Isabel and her now husband, Marcos, decided to make a move to California. They sold all of their belongings, loaded up what was left into a 1964 Chevy Malibu and headed West. Isabel gave herself one year in California to make it as a professional artist.

It didn’t take that long. California seemed to be waiting for her, and when she got there, everything clicked. She was selling her work for T-shirts, album covers, and posters. “Oddly enough, I did come full circle, and I started doing illustration again.,” she said.

One day a suggestion from an acquaintance found Isabel on yet another successful track. Someone suggested she start painting on TV trays. “I was looking for something that had a resonance for me the way the lunch boxes did. I really wasn’t interested in painting on canvases,” Isabel said. “The TV tray was self-framing; it wasn’t big, and it represented the TV stuff beautifully.”

Nowadays, Isabel works strictly as a full-time artist, doing jobs on a freelance basis, selling her art out of her home, and supplying paintings for shows around the country. She lives with her husband and their son, Nico, in San Francisco. Isabel is now thinking of moving on to doing larger paintings on her former nemesis: canvas. “I’m hoarding frames right now, the gold baroque ones, and some of them are quite large,” she said. “I want to do the same kind of imagery, especially the later work that riffs on old master paintings, but I want to do them on a more grand salon scale.”

Although she’s a little worried that the larger paintings won’t have the same kitchiness that her lunch boxes and television trays have enjoyed, Isabel isn’t letting that stop her from experimenting. It seems to me that there’s always a person who is supposed to buy these paintings. Somebody will have a huge response to one of these paintings specifically, and that seems like that was the person who was supposed to have that piece,” she said. “I don’t need thousands of people to love my work; I just need one person to know of each painting and like it.”

Beyond television and the master paintings, Isabel pulls influences from horror movies, Las Vegas lifestyles, and Mexican calendar art into her projects. She claims she has more ideas for paintings than she’ll ever be able to execute, and through it all, she remains a satisfied and happy artist. “I really rally against the Van Gogh myth of the miserable artist, partly because so many people buy into that and think they have to be miserable to create. I find that a very dangerous mental place, and I don’t think that anyone should take themselves there,” Isabel said.

“It’s a very romantic notion that we’re all starving and tortured. In my work there is one commonality – the joy of getting together. I want to depict the joys of life and to be happy and successful. It’s a short life. Enjoy yourself.”