Bio

Hey, my name is Sam. I ran my own web design company for about 15 years. During that time I designed and worked on literally thousands of websites. The more I worked in the industry, I realized that I don't really like the sales process of web development, don't particularly like working with clients, and mostly just enjoyed creating the websites.

About 5 years ago, I got really interested in working on DIY projects around my house, and started to really like working with tools and with my hands. One day my wife and I found a dresser on the side of the street for free. I picked it up, painted it and sold it the next day for $60. It wasn't much at the time, but this was the catalyst for me changing my career paths. I started working on more pieces, and it wasn't long before I decided to take a chance and start refinishing furniture full time. Over the next 3 years I worked all day, every day on repainting and refinishing furniture. During this time I finished well over 1000 dressers alone as well as other various types of furniture and decor pieces.

At some point I started to really enjoy painting custom, more artistic finishes on dressers. These turned out super cool, but the problem I ran into was that people primarily wanted furniture that was white, which limited my options to be creative. Around this time, my wife picked up a large, free cabinet, but when she brought it home, I realized it wasn't in good enough shape to refinish. I hated to see the whole thing go to waste, however, so I had the idea to take the huge backer board off of it - probably near 4x4ft, and create a painting on it similar to a finish I had been using on some dressers. The painting turned out great, I sold it relatively quickly and I was pretty much hooked from there. I had a ton of extra paint from my furniture business always took time at the end of every day to work on improving my painting skills. During this time I also found out about ProCreate, a tool for creating visual art, and I took to it really quickly. My 15 years in Web Design gave me a ton of experience with Photoshop, which translates really well to ProCreate. 

Since then, the furniture business dried up to a degree after the events of 2020, and my wife and I started shifting our focus to buying and selling vintage goods and antiques - particularly ephemera. An unintended side effect of this was that I ended up with a large amount of papers that were really cool and old, but not in good enough condition to sell - so rather than throw them away I started incorporating them into my art work, and have shifted a lot more into mixed media since then.

I live in the country in East Central Minnesota now with my wife and 3 kids, and still try to spend at least an hour or two every single day working on art in one way or another.