About + Q&A
Sam Binder is a painter from northeast Wisconsin who presently resides in Rochester, NY. He has been undertaking creative projects in various forms since 2006 and painting since 2015.
Sam's work has been featured in the 2020 State of the Art Gallery December juried show in Ithaca, NY.
This is Sam's portfolio site. It's (slowly, surely) getting backfilled; if you know a favorite piece that isn't here yet, keep waiting - it will probably show up soon.
What is this site?
I've got that manifesto over on it's own page.
What Does Subscribing Get You?
Subscribing is free - you provide an email, you sign in and can see some other things I've made on this site. You can also see the secret announcement with the email address for purchasing inquiries and commissions. Sometimes you'll get an email when there's a new post - "wow art right to your inbox!" - but you can also unsubscribe from those if you want (because who wants more emails?), my feelings aren't hurt by that.
Do you do NFTs at all?
Nope. That's cool that you like them and my art, but I try to keep all my speculative assets strictly physical. If there's a piece you want to own as an NFT, may I suggest buying the actual art object instead? I assure you it is just as non-fungible.
Do you do prints at all?
In general, I don't think my work lends itself well to prints - it uses out-of-gamut colors and monopigments that don't really translate well to CMYK or other forms of composite color, and heavily features textures, which don't really translate to flat prints on paper. That doesn't mean I'll never make them; however any that I do make would probably be designed explicitly as prints.
Are you other places online?
Sure. My art is on instagram. It used to be on cohost as well, but cohost is no longer a live site, unfortunately. It also used to be on ko-fi, cara, ello, and extremely briefly deviantart, but none of those felt like a good "home". I guess I'm on threads too as @fakesambinder, but I don't love how ragebait-prone their algorithm is so I try not to spend time there.
I'm also over on bluesky, @sambinder.bsky.social.
How should I navigate your site?
You should wander with no intent but discovery. I've tagged basically everything so you can get from one post to the next via link following, but here's some tags if you want to jump in:
• My Favorites
• Available for Purchase
• Jackets
• By Series: Another Cycle, This Pedal Does Not Exist, Quad Studies, Roco6x6, CityPop
• Mediums: Oil Paint, Acrylic Paint, Ink, Mixed Media, Watercolor
• Substrates: Canvas, Vinyl, Panel, Sheet Metal, Paper
• Sizes: Large Works, Medium Works, Small Works
• By color: Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Pink, Red, White, Black, Fluorescent
• By year: 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and earlier
• By subject: Abstracts, Cityscapes, Landscapes, People, Cats, Animals other than Cats
• By method: Impasto, Geometric, Cellular
All Tags Page, if you want to browse everything
I ordered a piece and it looks different in real life than it does in your photo; what gives?
That's a very real phenomenon tied to how color looks to the eye versus how color looks to a camera. I use pigments that are frequently out of the digital and digitally-printed gamut. The camera sees things slightly differently and photos taken with different cameras capture different things.
Also, being predominantly monopigment & out-of-gamut, my art is very susceptible to looking extremely different in different lighting conditions. I generally try to photograph in indirect "daylight" colored light (~6000K) but warmer light will dampen cool colors (blues/violets), while cooler light will deaden warm colors (reds/yellows).
Lastly, my art is not always lightfast - I use some fugitive pigments which will develop - fade, shift, or yellow - over the course of their lifetime. I also use oil paint, which does not fully cure for two full years. It can look different after time has passed, and I think that's a cool and interesting thing about them, that the art itself can change without human intervention. I see it as a sort of reversal of metaphor for how our understanding and evocative apparatus of a piece of art or music changes over time.
That said, I know it can also be frustrating to not get what you wanted. If you are worried about that, let me know ahead of purchase and I can give you a rough estimation on how things change — or, feel free to commission a non-developing duplicate.