Sam yeates

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Notes from the artist:

“To me, a painting is like a play unfolding on a stage. I populate each canvas with a personal world created from my imagination, memories and past experiences. My work is largely narrative, with much of the imagery drawn from my time growing up isolated on a farm in North Central Texas.

The open landscapes seen from a porch at twilight, or the still water of a swimming pool reflecting the sky at dusk, help set the mood for many of my paintings and are drawn from my youthful memories and musings as I navigated my rural upbringing. Other memories such as cats stalking birds around the barns, and horses standing quietly in the evening, have also found their way into my work. Country roads, paved and gravel, play a part as well. For young people in rural Texas, many mysteries of life are experienced for the first time along the quiet loneliness of country roads. These same roads are also the paths to adventure and discovery. I learned to dance in the headlights of a car on a gravel road with the music from the radio drifting from the windows.

From this time period I also bring a fascination with what wings represented to me. In my youth I had dreams that I could miraculously fly, only to wake and find myself still bound to this world. I believe wings represent freedom, escape, and the wish we all have to transcend this existence. Whether in the playful imagery of winged cats in the No Birds Would Sing If Cats Had Wings paintings, or in the break with the two-dimensional barrier of the picture plane in the more classically themed Orpheus, Icarus and Muse series, wings play a large part in my work. 

But I also like to play around with classical composition and for several years now, patterns, or as some people refer to them, wallpaper designs, have played a part in my work. They're useful for compositional reasons, but also because they create a reaction from the viewer. The older designs invoke the past or things that are lost and a cultural memory of times gone by and bring a lightness to otherwise heavy subjects.

All these themes continue to play a part in my artwork, but more recently I’ve been influenced by time that my wife and I spent in Oaxaca. We loved how parades and celebrations seemed to happen every day, with dancers in bright colors, often with large baskets filled with floral arrangements on their heads, swirling down the narrow streets accompanied by brass bands and large crowds marching alongside. When we returned home and Covid changed the world, I looked back on the joy, color, and sense of community of these events and decided to focus much of my recent work on attempting to capture those feelings on canvas.”

Bio:

Sam Yeates is an American original. He grew up on a farm 16 miles outside of Stephenville, Texas. In that part of North Central Texas there was not much exposure to the arts. That is, if you don't count the occasional feed store calendar and lots of good country music.  However, the long, flat and empty Texas landscape offered him a blank canvas for his mind, while the endless sky and magnificent ever-changing cloud formations fueled his imagination and dreams.  

Leaving that world behind in the 1970’s, Sam graduated from North Texas State University with a degree in Fine Arts and moved to Dallas where he taught at the Dallas International School of Art and was soon head of faculty. Seeking more freedom to express himself, he shortly moved to Austin, Texas. There he became part of the vibrant music scene of the seventies and began creating music posters for clubs and bands, joining a tight-knit group of Austin poster artists. This led to over a decade of being under contract with Lone Star Beer, producing paintings for posters and promotional work for them as well as for Willie Nelson, Heileman and Budweiser Brewing Companies, Warner Brothers Records and First Publishing of Chicago. His work began appearing in publications as diverse as Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone.

During this time in his career, Sam never stopped developing his own vision through his personal artwork and paintings, even having one of his paintings chosen to be on a United Nations postage stamp in 2000. His art has been featured in places such as Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., St. James Palace in London, The World Trade Centre in Stockholm, The United Nations Headquarters in New York, TheArtFoundation in Hot Springs National Park, Arkansas, and The Benini Foundation and Sculpture Ranch in Johnson City, Texas.

Sam’s art is part of the permanent collections of the Lone Star, Budweiser and Heileman Brewing Companies, North East Missouri State University, Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas, Smithsonian Museum, Corpus Christi Art Museum, and the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. He recently donated an archive of his work to the Witliff Collection at Texas State University.

Sam has had commissions for portraits, large historical paintings, murals and most recently two paintings for the Country Music Museum in Nashville that help to tell the story of Willie Nelson and the rise of Progressive Country in the Seventies.

Sam currently resides and paints in Santa Fe.