Sam Woolcott
Sam Woolcott was born and raised in New England and headed west around 1970. In Montana she found the open space and big sky she was looking for and spent several years working on ranches and guiding fly–fishing trips. She went on to study architecture and eventually ended up living on a small sailboat in the Greek Islands.
It was there that she began drawing and painting, spending the next five years exploring elements of space, structure, and light around the Aegean. Seeking the edge between abstraction and form, her work is informed by Rembrandt, Goya, Giacometti, Bacon, Diebenkorn and Keifer.
Now settled in the historic mining town of Bisbee, in southeastern Arizona, her work addresses the precarious nature of places, and the hardscrabble lives of those before, of what has endured, and what will be lost to time.
She and her artist husband, Poe Dismuke, have now opened their own gallery, the SAMPOE Gallery, in the heart of downtown Old Bisbee.
She has won awards in national art shows including First Place in Painting and three-time Award Winner in Drawing at the Sausalito Art Festival in California and the Jurors Award at the Plaza Show in Kansas City, Kansas in 2005. Locally, Sam won Best in Show at the Bisbee Plein Air Competition in 2004 and again in 2007, along with winning the Bisbee Artist Award.
She continues to travel and paint in Greece, Morocco, Russia, Ireland, and nearby Mexico.