Samantha Cirinna was born in 1970 in the United Kingdom and moved to Canada as a youngster. She received a scholarship into the fine arts program at York University in 1989 and studied painting under the late Lynn Donoghue, graduating from the program in 1995. She has a full time studio practice in Brooklin, Ontario and her work is featured in private and corporate collections.

Artist’s Statement:

“I am interested in the substance and properties of paint, and its response to a variety of external elements acting upon it, including different brushes, viscosities, layers, and weaves of the canvas. My work explores a variety of viewer responses and I propose that an individual brushstroke can have as much to impart to the experience as the sum of those brushstrokes.

Most recently, I have been using flowering trees as the basis for an exploration in the architecture of visual language - leveraging these forms to explore colour relationships, line, texture, and form. I use a variety of visual signifiers to evoke subject, using very random and abstract forms, combined with more specific, sometimes naïve representations of the flowers. Using both literal and imagined space in the work appeals to the viewer on a variety of levels, which adds complexity of the experience.