Artist Samantha Bittman Combines Her Love of Weaving With Paint

Sometimes the right things come to you at the perfect time. For the artist Samantha Bittman, it was weaving, which she first discovered as a freshman undergraduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design. A friendly teaching assistant was a textiles major and used to share her projects. Bittman started to spend more time at the textile studio and was immediately hooked. “When I saw all of the yarns on the shelves and the loom room with rows of handweaving looms, I knew right away that it was exactly what I wanted to do,” she said.

To make her bold and intricately designed pieces, Bittman first weaves a textile on a handloom in her East Williamsburg studio, letting the weave structure and limitations of the loom dictate the patterns. Once finished, she stretches the textile and paints over parts of the design, filling in gaps and making additions not possible with the loom. “This way of working allows for more improvisation and decision making that is more responsive to the work as a whole,” she explained. “The result is something that is both weaving and painting and, oftentimes, it is difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the two surfaces in my work, especially in reproduction.”

After a year in which so much activity, artistic or otherwise, was put on hold, Bittman said her work is starting to pick up again. She recently prepared pieces for a solo show at Ronchini Gallery in London that opened in March and is working on a wallpaper installation for the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y.

[Photos by Samantha Bittman]

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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