Preston William Sampson III
Preston Sampson, a native of West Palm Beach, FL, who has a Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland, combines the skillful use of acrylic paints and vigorous broad-brush strokes to create a canvas pulsating with rhythm and movement. A jazz enthusiast, Sampson's most exuberant paintings are the expansion of melodic ideas. A recurring theme in Sampson's work is the dominant male figure, done in epic and heroic scale. He has completed a series of works portraying the life and play of the African American men who starred in the Negro Baseball Leagues for nearly half a century.
During the summer of 1994, Sampson was awarded a fellowship that allowed him to travel to Spain, where he painted landscapes and people, focusing on torsos. Sampson has been featured in numerous national publications, such as Town & Country, Playbill, American Visions, and Black Enterprise magazines. He has been critically recognized in the Washington Post for his first retrospective at the University of Maryland in 1997, and in the International Review of African American Art comprehensive guide for collecting in 1998. In 1997, he was commissioned by Absolut Vodka to create a painting for their award-winning ad campaign. Absolut Sampson has been a part of a traveling collection which has made stops in Miami, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
