Sam Whitaker

 

Sam Whitaker grew up in New York, but spent a lot of time on his grandparent’s farm in Northwestern Connecticut that sat above a river valley. It was a very rural place with its own raw beauty that showed him that Nature was big and mysterious. At an early age his parents exposed him to art and literature and encouraged his first formal art training with the painter Mark Potter, a friend of Andrew Wyeth. During the Summer, he took courses at the Art Students League of New York. New York exposed him to the great art in museums and the variety of artists in the galleries. To continue his development as an artist, he received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Here he began the directness and spontaneity of his Pen & Ink drawings. After graduation, he came to Chicago and received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he further developed his unique painterly approach, expressing the light and movement of the subject through the richly layered oil paint on canvas.

 

He lives and works in Chicago with his wife Stella Zee who is also painter. 

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