9-21st October 201

Brompton Garage, 1 North Terrace, London SW3

11-6pm, open till 9pm Tuesday October 12

I have known Samantha for over three decades, during which she has never wavered from her course of being a deeply committed artist.

Her father Rory McEwen was the pre-eminent Botanical painter of the 20th century, who was also a national folk hero in Scotland, a guitarist and singer who appeared on television every week. A major retrospective of Rory McEwen is to be held at Kew in 2012 while this October sees an exhibition of Samantha’s recent works.

At the age of 17 Samantha’s mother, Romana, (granddaughter of Hugo Von Hofmannsthal, Strauss’ great librettist;) sent her to New York to study art. “Quite by chance I picked the School of Visual Arts, a graphic arts school from a catalogue, where teachers were professional artists.

“My class were an extraordinary bunch of people; a star generation.” Among them was Keith Haring, who was to become her best friend and flat mate. “I absorbed the directness and colour of Keith’s work and even though I come from a romantic and languid Scottish background, he instilled me with tremendous energy.

Living in the East Village and the Bowery Samantha was thrown into the whirl pool of the graffiti art East Village scene with Jean Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf and knew Robert Maplethorpe and Andy Warhol. Samantha had a solo show at the famous Tony Shafrazi Gallery who championed graffiti art although Samantha es- chewed the graffiti style. “Graffiti art was too specific for me; Francesco Clemente and Alex Katz were great sources of inspira tion, both of whom she modelled for.

Returning to London in the 90′s and the Y.B.A’s phenomenon she remained faithful to her own particular vision exhibiting in group shows and two one woman shows. Painting for her forthcoming one woman show this autumn “has bought me back into the world of imagery,” and there has been a gradual genesis from the abstract to figurative. “And yet for me there is no difference between abstract and figurative. This latest body of work is decorative,” she announces confidently as we climb the stairs to her studio. But then so is Matisse decorative.

Her studio is scattered with bags of colour and silver pigments from Japan, photographs of family weddings, a slide projector, acetate tarpaulin emblazoned with a gargantuan black dog with a shocking pink tongue painted in acrylic. On other silver glamé tarpaulins hanging from floor to ceiling; usually the province of theatre sets, are the beginnings of silver wedding portraits.

As the images unfurled layer by layer I felt, to paraphrase Kundera is ‘a lightness of being’ and to attempt to describe these paintings feels hopelessly inadequate. My words tasted stale in the light of these exquisite pieces and their effect on the senses.

Some of the images so fragile in their execution have floating calligraphic flourishes with fleeting banal americanisms such as ‘It’s been nice talking to you’ and ‘Be my guest’ or “I’ll be seeing you” in memorium to Angus Fairhurst. There is something ephemeral in her paintings that seem to reflect light, “Natural light inspires me I endeavour to paint it as a prism. The work is on quantum level.”

Celia Lyttelton