Sam Lock trained at Edinburgh University and Art College, graduating with an MA Fine Art Painting and MA History of Art in 1997.  Whilst at college he won a scholarship award to travel to Rome to explore his interest in the relationship between history, archaeology and the processes of painting, a preoccupation that has fired his work and continues to underpin his practice.

Sam’s paintings are accumulations of materials and decisions; artefacts of thinking and doing, an attempt to locate poetry in the relationships, combinations and interactions between materials and physical elements. These paintings are informed by natural process, explorations of geography/archaeology, physicality, cause and effect. His works celebrate an aesthetic of imperfection, they have a highly physical presence, that reflect his robust approach to painting; each surface is scored, scratched, scorched, stained, sanded, sealed. His intent is to create space and surface that snags, tangles and holds the viewer. His work aims to explore, express and animate the painted space – alternating between freedom and expanse and the constricted and dense - like forest and sky.

Originally from London, Sam lived in Canada, trained at Edinburgh and now lives by the coast in Brighton.  His studio is part of a rundown and delapidated house in the city centre, a space conjucive to exploring the ravages of time and decay.

His exhibition profile includes several site-specific exhibitions within reappropriated spaces as part of the ConTemporary Art Group in Brighton, regular representation at the Affordable Art Fair and Brighton Art Fair, and he has also produced work for design projects that include restaurants, hotels and villas in Saudi Arabia and Malta.

His most recent works explore themes of loss and absence, the spaces where things and people once were, layers of presence and history.  Incorporating collaged found maps and architectural plans, these paintings retain and repress spaces, shift boundaries and borders, missing links, lost information; a metaphor for a constantly changing landscape and a world where relationships are formed and forgotten, where lives lived are past, presence and future.