Sam Vokey is a painter of still life and landscapes works, which he creates en plein air as well as in his studio at Fenway Studios.

Vokey graduated from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine with a minor in studio arts. After college he received a five-year scholarship to the R.H. Ives Gammell Studio in Boston. His experiences at the atelier shaped him as a painter. He was taught with the rigorous classical teaching methods of the French Academy and was introduced to the methods of the Boston School.

Vokey's honors include the Edmund C Tarbell award for painting at the Guild of Boston Artists. He is also a member of the Copley Society of Boston. Sam Vokey has exhibited in museums and galleries across the country and internationally including, The Harvard Club, the Attleboro Museum, the Brockton Art Museum and the Museo de Arte Americano in Maldonado, Uruguay.

Source:
American Artist, April 2005

Painting in the tradition of the "Boston School", Sam Vokey was born in 1963 and educated at Bowdoin College, and subsequently at the R.H. Ives Gammell Studio in Boston from 1989-1994. While at the Gammell Studio, Vokey also worked privately with two of the senior Boston School artists, Robert Cormier and Robert Douglas Hunter.

The classic atelier training he received during this period, with its emphasis on working directly from life and in natural light, is at the center of the painting style of his early artistic maturity. Vokey's oils, whether still lifes or landscapes, constantly explore highly sophisticated balances both of overall composition, and of light and dark values within the composition. As with the style of his Boston School predecessors who had admired and emulated simultaneously both French Salon painting and French Impressionism, Vokey's technique crosses Realism with some of the softer edges and painterly qualities of Impressionism.

To his technical skill, Vokey, still in his thirties and a rapidly rising star, adds a fine eye for subject matter in the production of his astonishingly mature, sophisticated, and beautiful paintings.

Vokey, who has been designated a Copley Artist, has had a solo exhibition at the Copley Society of Boston (1993), and has been in group shows including Boston's St. Botolph Club (1990), the Fuller Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts (1991), and Tree's Place (1996).

He has been featured in Cape Cod Life magazine (August 1998), and has placed works in major private and public collections, including Merrill Lynch, Bank of Boston, Henry Kravis, and former Presidents of both Ireland and Uruguay.

Sam Vokey attended R. H. Ives Gammel Atleier in Boston. His painting style is most closely associated with the Boston School tradition of painting, which crosses Realism with some of the softer edges and painterly qualities of Impressionism.

Sam Vokey has had numerous one-man shows and shared two and three person shows in Massachusetts. He has won a number of prestigious awards including Copley Master and the John Singleton Copley Award, the highest honor of the Copley Society.

His paintings have also been on the cover American Artist magazine. In 2006, one of Vokey's still life paintings was acquired by The Cape Cod Museum of Art for the permanent collection. His paintings are also found in private collections nationally and internationally.