The painter lives in a state of semi-hermitage in Central Portugal. His days are spent painting and caring for his farm animals, ocasionally leaving the studio for a coffee and a biscuit.
Contacts
sam_abercromby@sapo.pt
“The older I get the stronger my desire to find and create metaphor – to start a movement of metaphorism ;-).
I reserve the right as an artist to take myth and officially accepted histories, and ‘reinvest them’ giving them creative, subjective, lyric and heroic interpretations… enabling them as stimuli to a new path for my painting”.
All series potentially represent MAN ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE,
Sam Abercromby
Vila do Paço, 8 September 2023
Since I found Sebastian I have profoundly elaborated my understanding of narrative – I unapologetically like narrative. I don’t care if it isn’t fashionable.
Art about art is incestuous, cannibalistic and elitist in my opinion. By happenstance, coincidence or chance or even pure destiny or luck… I arrived in Portugal in 1986 to an antique culture of poetry and song that I had never encountered in Australia. I recognized that it was elaborated often through metaphor.
Using metaphors as a vehicle drove me as it did Luís de Camões – the great national Portuguese poet – who wrote a massive epic poem that was both recent and historical metaphor. Then I discovered Fernando Pessoa with his 3 major expressive alter-egos (he called them heteronyms to capture their true independent intellectual lives) … I have always recognized that there was more than one aesthetic understanding and more than one technique available to me at any one moment for any one idea or objective when painting – I can draw upon multiple personalities while painting.
I have been asked who my audience is – and I always answer “finally, I paint for me”.
My natural expression is rooted in classical painting pre-picasso. While in Australia I had always looked to Europe and historical Europe for inspiration which was why I became interested in “the fall of man” using classical painting and religious iconography as my inspiration. Myth plus metaphor plus romantic realism plus impressionism and even 19th century romanticism.
My Sebastianism work is grand in scale, generally oil on wood.
I have discovered that I’m happiest when I naturally lean towards portraiture and mostly life sized portraiture… desiring to capture moments of Sebastian’s odyssey. As a classical/romantic I want to include an abundance of nature.
Partial Bio
In that year of ‘94, Sam already had a long career as a painter and multifaceted artist, with long work visits to Athens, as early as 1968, Rome, Paris, London, Singapore with a return to Australia he carried out a large commission from the West Australian government in the refurbished His Majesty’s Theater in collaboration with Janne Ormerod.
Arriving in Central Portugal in 1986 Sam lived at the Loja Grande in Vila do Paço for more than 10 years, painted frescoes, wooden panels and large canvases. He became an artist of the land, picking fruit, building his studio and farmhouse with his own hands while carrying out musical projects. But above all, he created a vast OEUVRE that emerged from creative, conceptual and experiential cycles, where his autobiography and his characters were mixed in narratives dense with symbolic meanings and an oneiric charge close to surrealist approaches or magical realism, if we can summon this tendency to painting.