July’s Virtual Tiny Gallery Features Lucas Sams’ Acrylic & Glass Ruminations on Past and Future.

Last month, Jasper transitioned our Tiny Gallery series online in a show featuring ceramic artist Vanessa Hewitt Devore. This month, we’re thrilled to feature our longtime friend artist, Lucas Sams, and his new collection, Paintings on Glass.

Sams, 30, is an award-winning Columbia based multi-media artist working in painting, sculpture, film, digital/multimedia, and installation art.  He was born in Greenwood, South Carolina and has resided in SC for most of his life, except for a year spent in Tokyo, Japan. “I think both of these facts have greatly influenced me in ways I am not yet fully aware of,” Sams shares.

Sams has been drawing since he could hold a pen, constantly supported by his family; specifically, his father, Carroll Sams of Greenwood, SC, and grandfather, John Proctor, both of whom helped teach Sams some of the basics. Sams shares that a lack of art classes at his Christian school made him have to search for ways to be self-motivated. “I drew during most of my classes whenever possible,” he says, “Drawing cartoons and comics before slowly transitioning into a shudder ‘fine artist.’”

Despite the lack of classes, Sams exhibited work throughout middle and high school, going on to attend the SC Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities and the University of South Carolina, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Painting and Art History.

Sams started showing work “professionally” in Columbia in 2009. In the past decade, he’s worked in a variety of 2D and 3D mediums, including film and installation art. These days, however, he’s mostly painting and drawing or working with ceramics. “This show with Tiny Gallery consists of paintings on glass,” Sams details, “using a technique of painting images in reverse directly on glass taught to me by my father when I was a kid.”