the year I sold my first real painting

and everything began to shift

If you’d like to read the first entry of this series, please do so here

Part II

Charleston, 2018. Two years in to this new life down south, and something shifts. We move across the bridge to John’s Island, into a two-bedroom apartment where, for the first time, I claim a room just for myself. A space to create, a space just for me and my painting.

What a fucking dream. 

I’m painting into the early morning hours after my full-time nanny job, I’m painting more than I’m making friends or spending time at the ocean. I’m obsessive. I have an outlet. I have something that is bigger than me.

I order two cheap bookshelves from Ikea and purchase a wooden door from Lowes, painting it white before drilling it into the tops of the shelves to form my first ever studio desk. Two long rows of wood are nailed into the open wall for me to hang my work, with the morning light pouring in from the east facing window. I lay plastic and tarps across the floor to protect the soft carpet underneath. A place fully dedicated to my work. How is this even possible? 

Last year, I turned down my teaching offers. The pay was nearly half of what I was making up North, which was barely survivable as it was. 37k per year, to be exact.

I turned back to what I knew at the time: food and beverage. Being raised in a restaurant does help your life experience… it’s a series of skills you never lose. I was hired immediately by a little juice and smoothie company, owned and operated by a couple on Folly Beach.  I would show up to work at 6 am to prep, open the trailer for sunrise, and end my shift at 2 or 3pm. Being right on the beach, I’d pack a bag and run into the ocean directly after, extra smoothie in-hand. Not a bad gig for something that others looked down upon.

I’m in my mid 20’s and have taken ten steps back. I was suddenly off the good-girl track of the steady career and white-picket fence. The horror my parents must have felt back home. 

I’ll never forget the silence on the other end of the line as I told them I would no longer be an educator and curriculum advisor, but a full-time smoothie maker. “The hours and money are great, plus– it gives me so much more time to focus on my art” 

“And how is that going to make you any money??”

I had no idea, but I knew somewhere deep down, this was the right call. I was 900 miles away… it was going to take a lot more for them to keep a hold on my life choices now. 

Little defiant teenage Sam lives to see another day—

On my second day of the Juice Trailer shift, I show up to be trained by a girl who had just put in her two weeks. We both have septum piercings and several tattoos. It’s the first person I’ve met down South that has any means of outward expression on their body. “Dude we match!” I say, tugging on my nose ring. She snorts subtly, not even looking up at me while cutting a pile of blood-red beets into halves. 

“Good luck working here. I just had to kill two huge roaches when I walked in the door.” Slight pause– “I’m Keira.” No expression or smile on her face. My kind of girl. 

Three and a half years later, I sit across from Keira with coffee outside of a shop downtown after our morning yoga class… the yoga she had diligently coaxed me into that is now a foundation in my everyday life. “You know you are allowed to leave him right?” she says to me… leaning closer so I can stare directly into her eyes. “You don’t need permission from a single other person to change your mind and get the fuck out of this situation. You know that right?”

*I took this photo in 2019, in a yoga class where we pulled intention cards for ‘something we needed to hear’. I remember the literal gut punch of reading the exact permission I needed to leave my relationship*

Keira changed my life from the moment I walked into hers at that shitty Juice Trailer 9 years ago. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. We’ve helped each other move from at least 10 different homes and apartments. She’s the dogmother to all of my animals. She’s hosted retreats with me, held me in my worst moments, celebrated me in my best. 

It’s wild to think that if I had been hired even a week later, or decided not to take the job pressing juices on folly beach– we would have never met. Or maybe we would have… as the universe tends to tether in one way or another. 

(Back on the original timeline) It’s still 2018 and It’s been two years since I began painting again, starting with the heavily-textured ocean waves that I layered on canvas and sold at the Charleston City Market every weekend until 11pm. Palette knife texture and water felt soothing. It felt safe. There was much less I had to peel back— within me— in order to create that work. And people loved to buy paintings of the water. 

In selling these little digestible wave paintings at the market, I came across a girl who was painting something similar. Her heavily textured paintings focused on landscapes, still-lives, and seascapes just like me. She approached my booth one night after hearing someone down the way was painting similar to her style… and wanted to scope me out.

“Hey, I’m Bri,” she says…bold, but quiet…fingers tracing the edges of my work without looking up. “I paint seascapes and stuff too… I’m a few booths down. Maybe we could grab a coffee sometime.”

She finally looks up at me, and for a split second, I’m unsure—am I being asked on a date, or is she just figuring out if she even likes me? Regardless, I’m down to find out.

“That would be fun,” I say, hesitant but intrigued. It would be really nice to have a friend in the arts community here. I’ve wanted someone to swap ideas with, maybe someone to pose for me in the studio, or someone to talk business strategy with. Up until that point, I was fully alone in it all. I had no one to bounce ideas off of. No one else understood where I wanted to take all of this. Where I dreamed of taking my life.

*Bri and I at one of our first gallery openings in 2018*

To say we’ve been inseparable ever since that moment at the Charleston City Market… doesn’t quite cut it. From that moment on, something clicked. A soul-bond. The kind that rearranges your entire idea of what’s possible. Bri and Keira will be the glue of my life as I navigate life changes over the next two years. Bri and Keira are the kind of support system every person on this earth deserves to experience. 

All because I quit my job as a teacher to say yes to pressing juices in a trailer on folly beach, and decided I was good enough to sell my seascape paintings at the city market. With random risk comes great reward. I had chosen to willingly step out of the box life had made for me, even though I was unsure of what box I was stepping into.

The return on that was tenfold.

I wish I could go back to that phone call with my parents and tell them that because I’ve left my safe career– I’ve met the two people who will single-handedly save me from fucking up my entire life path —by supporting me in the leaving of my toxic relationship. That you cannot put a monetary cost on life-saving decisions. 

The domino effect can take you places you never even dreamed of standing. 

*Bri and I working on one of the first collaborations we’ve ever done together at our Redux Studios in 2018*

But in 2017, things began to truly shift. I wanted to go back to the figurative work I had loved all those years ago at Marywood– my tiny art college– where I’d sit for hours and flip through work of Renoir and Gentileschi and Degas.

The shift back towards figurative work was symbolic– leaving the comfort and safety of the simplistic seascapes I’d been creating… to push myself into something new, uncharted and much more vulnerable. 

Looking back on this moment, the return to figurative painting wasn’t just a change in style… it was a reclamation of self. I had been safe in the soothing repetition of seascapes. They sold well. They kept people comfortable. It was palatable art. It represented the good girl within me. 

But they also kept me hidden. Choosing to paint the figure—even my body—was a choice to be seen. To be raw. To tell the truth.

I had never told the truth about my life before this. I had never even considered that was allowed.

At the time, showing nude work in the traditional South felt almost laughably-radical. I was told not to bring them to the market. That they were technically ‘inappropriate’ for the audience there. 

So I split myself in two.

By day, I played the part of the palatable artist… creating oceans and pastels and things people could hang in their beach houses without being challenged. But when I’d show up to the studio, boredom would set in. I needed something else. Something bigger.

I stripped down in my studio and became my own references. I studied the way grief settled in my spine. How heartbreak made its way into the curl of my fingers. I painted the truth of what it meant to survive…. how trauma, desire, and healing live in the muscles. The body became my obsession. 

And so at a crossroads, something shifted. It was symbolic not just of the work, but of my life in general. There was a version of me was celebrated. The other… too big. Too complicated. Too raw. 

And the same split was unfolding in my personal life.

*One of the first large paintings I created in this new space, one that felt like the right direction to head in—

On the outside, I looked like a 25 year old woman who had figured it all out…. engaged to the love of her life, planning a future, checking every box. But beneath the surface, something was unraveling. I was restless. Disconnected. I kept pushing down the quiet truth inside me, the one that whispered: this isn’t it. Something is not safe here. 

The version of me who longed for something deeper in her life and her work and questioned everything…. She wasn’t wrong. I knew I had to follow where the rabbit hole led.

And even though selling my work at the City Market was a large part of my income at the time, I decided my time there would have to come to an end. 

Within that same time frame, my discipline started to pay off. Maris DeHart sponsored what was then known as Charleston Fashion Week, and had chosen me as the sponsored artist to sell prints of my charcoal figurative pieces. I had over 1,000 prints reproduced. When I placed this order, it took almost everything I had in my bank account to make it happen. It was the first time I was able to see my work in a real setting where such a large crowd was interacting with it. There was press, there was a buzz, there was excitement. I felt the momentum growing. I almost felt a sense of pride.

Six months later, I was offered my first exhibition with a gallery downtown. Seeing my new work up on those white walls changed something in me. Friends and strangers gathering to support my work felt inaccessible emotionally, I couldn’t believe I had created an opportunity where my nude portraits were shown in a public setting in Charleston, SC. 

My fiancé didn’t come to the show.

The part of me that had always been on guard—the one I’d tried so hard to shove further down where I could not hear her—recoiled in anger and resentment. I knew, deep down, that my success unsettled him. That my expansion would cost us something. Cost me something. Still, I tucked the inevitable instinct of truth away, made excuses for him, joked about how busy his schedule was.

But some part of me knew: this wasn’t about a missed evening. It was about a growing divide neither of us could name out loud.

*Photos from that very show, my first ever gallery exhibition in downtown Charleston*

2019 was a turning point year. After some pushing and convincing, my fiance agreed to allow a studio rental space of my own outside of our apartment. Back then, I needed permission. I cannot believe that version of myself held on for so long—

Redux Contemporary Arts Center was opening a brand new space on upper King, with triple the amount of studios within their current building. I remember when researching the arts in Charleston in 2015, Redux was top of the list. All of the most successful and inspiring artists in this city held studios there. I wanted nothing more than to have a real-life studio. I marched into the office in 2016, when we first came to Charleston. The director told me there was over a three-year waitlist. 

But now, with this new building, they’d be taking applications for the first time. When I was accepted, I couldn’t believe I was finally going to have a community of people surrounding me when I showed up to paint each day. 

Bri’s studio was just one hallway over from mine. Keira showed up with a bucket of white paint to help me paint the floors and the walls. We transported my DIY desk from my second bedroom to my brand new 400 SQFT space. It was smaller than my second bedroom, but stood for so much more.

I was on the path to calling myself an actual artist. Even though I was now nannying full-time and painting as much as I could, I felt validated for the first time in my life choices. 

*The walls of my little studio at Redux, with some of the first paintings I ever sold—*

Money was extremely tight. There were months I had to charge my studio rental fee, because we were somehow not clearing our bills.. Even though I was making more money than I ever had before. My credit card was suddenly high...needing to charge our electric bill or groceries when he said we had run dry. My cash was given to my partner each month to pay the rent, to pay the bills. A blind trust. A sense of control.

Something wasn’t adding up, but it was too hard to face. So I just worked harder. I began tucking away little bits of cash that I made at the market as an emergency fund. At the time, it felt like betrayal. But the little knowing deep down told me it had to be done. My lost self- the one who didn’t care what happened to her- was waking up.

At the first open studio, I hang my new pieces proudly on the wall and watch art collectors from around the city fill up the building. Strangers stop to enter my studio and ask me questions about the work, seeing things I thought only I cared about. Several of them buy sketches directly off my wall, and one even buys an original piece.

“950 dollars in cash” I remember whispering to myself in disbelief at the night’s end, fully unable to process what’s just happened. 

I can sell my art. People believe my art is worth something.

My life will never be the same.

As my journey here in Charleston winds down for now, I’ll continue reflecting on my time here through these little memos. To read the next bit, please subscribe below x

Some more photos from my studio and exhibitions in 2018—