By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times
Even while serving as an emergency room (ER) nurse for more than three decades, Brenda Sampson never gave up on her dream of becoming an artist.
Sampson, who has worked at both the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Medical West Hospital in Bessemer, Alabama, and Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham, said, “I did some art on the side, and the ERs … allowed me to put my artwork on the walls [of the facilities].”
When she retired in 2019, Sampson created a website and did artwork where she would sell from a pitch tent, the most recent of which was set up for this year’s Juneteenth National Independence Day.
“Looking at artists from the past, I would think I could draw it better than they did,” she said.
Introduction to Art
Sampson, born and raised in Bessemer, always wanted to be an artist, but she knew her mother wouldn’t approve of it.
“My mother wasn’t going to allow her young baby daughter to be an artist and starve to death. My sister and I both went to nursing school,” said Sampson, who attended J. S. Abrams Elementary School and graduated from Jess Lanier High School in 1973. (Jess Lanier closed in 2009, and students in the area now attend Bessemer City High School.)
Growing up during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Sampson’s artistic start came as a result of school integration.
“I was in the third grade when [the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] came to Birmingham,” she said, recalling the Children’s Crusade of 1963, when students took to the streets to protest segregation in the city—an event that eventually led to significant federal Civil Rights legislation.
“The school kids got let out and went [downtown] Birmingham to march with Dr. King,” she said. “I was too young, so I had to go home. … When I got there, all my brothers and sisters were there, except for my oldest brother.”
Sampson remembers being in a segregated school until 1971, when a brand-new school was built for Black and white students.
“That’s when I was introduced to art,” she said. “[The integrated school had] an art teacher, which we did not have in the Black school. Then, when I went to Lawson State [Community College] to take up nursing, they also had art programs, so I started drawing more.”
Though Sampson was in the art program on the side while studying nursing, she “didn’t do a lot of drawing until 2019.”
Most of Sampson’s pieces are inspired by whatever she finds interesting, she said: “I pull from anything I see. I pull from people’s faces. I might like their eyes, or I might like their nose, and I’ll mix it up and put it on a canvas or something like that.”
Of her chosen art mediums, Sampson said, “[I] love using acrylic art. I do oil paint and a lot of sketches.”
She added, “I like controversy, … to get [people] talking.
“When you come up to a piece of art, it’s different for everybody. A lot of people [may not understand] our inspiration or may look at it and ask, ‘What is that?’ They are going to buy something to match their living room or their walls. But people that have [a greater appreciation of art] will stand in front of the canvas, look to the left, look to the right, examine the brushstrokes, stand back and see what the artist was thinking.”
Eye of the Beholder
One of Sampson’s pieces that gets people talking is her painting of a woman with a banana. Describing the image, she said, “I made a girl, and I call it ‘Delicious.’ … What she is doing is sucking on a chocolate-covered banana, and the chocolate is running down her mouth. You can obviously see that it’s a banana, and I have these beautiful colors in the background like she’s enjoying this banana. The guys see something else, but they won’t say exactly what.”
In addition to being an art creator, Sampson is an art collector with about 100 pieces. One of her favorites—”Three for the Groove,” a painting by Marcus Glenn, a contemporary artist out of Detroit, Michigan—came from an art auction she attended while on a cruise.
“I bargained on that and spent $1,200,” she said. “I was looking for something that would stick to me. There were hundreds of pieces, and they let us look through them before starting the auction. None of the other pieces [spoke] to me, [but Glenn’s piece] was showing his love for music. I didn’t even know he was a Black artist.”
Sampson’s favorite artists are “the greats,” including Pablo Picasso, the renowned Spanish artist whose works include paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, and costumes, and Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, known for his vivid portraits and dramatic still-life and landscape pieces.
Tropical Fish
When she is not creating, Sampson enjoys spending time with her husband, George, who is a tropical fish enthusiast.
“We have 14 fish tanks,” she said. “[George] can tell you when something is wrong. If they’re pregnant, he’ll move them to the pregnancy fish tank and raise them.”
Sampson and her husband also enjoy traveling: “We love islands. We’ve been to Hawaii, [where] we remarried about 21 years ago, … right as [our] cruise ship was in front of a volcano.”
The couple currently resides in Fairfield, Alabama. They have been married for 31 years, and they have four children and five grandchildren.
To browse Brenda Sampson’s artwork, visit keepsakeartwork.com.
