Busy local artist takes a new turn

She’s the newest member of the Visual Arts Studio Association and she isn’t taking long to make her mark with a new show.

Samantha Williams-Chapelsky, by now a well-recognized name in St. Albert’s arts scene, has her first solo exhibit at the VASA Studio Gallery and it runs the range from small to large, paper to silk, and jacquard to acrylic to oil.

Fibre of Silk comes only a few months after she exhibited in India. That in turn, was preceded by one show at the Naess Gallery and another show with Claire Uhlick at the Art Gallery of St. Albert, which is also where Williams-Chapelsky works. She designed the trophies for last year’s Mayor's Celebration of the Arts Awards. She’s represented by the Daffodil Gallery, itself a new but rising name in local visual arts.

A lack of energy, it would seem, is not an issue for her. She already has upcoming solo shows planned in Spruce Grove in June and at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in November for a two-month stretch. She also is taking her unique story house sculptures to the city’s Family Day activities in a few weeks. Previously, these delightful objects were displayed at Prairie Gardens and then at the Deep Freeze Festival last month.

She admits that when she isn’t working at her day job then she is practicing her art, and in her spare time she is constantly applying for other projects.

“The more things I’m signed up for, the more productive I’ll be,” she confessed.

Fibre of Silk is another new turn for the painter/sculptor who doesn’t seem satisfied until she has tried everything.

“That’s what I love to do, experimenting with found materials and different techniques.”

This series of surreal abstract landscapes – one with a definite building in it – should look familiar to fans of her work. She uses the canvas to express either her feelings about places that she’s been to, like Scotland, or sometimes places that exist just in her imagination. The journey goes from a desolate eerie crag of rock to a vast gorgeous span of sea.

It’s clear that she is most at home trying out different ideas and media. She has only been working with this habotai silk for four months now but who knows where she will go from here.