Samere Tansley

SAMERE TANSLEY was born in the U.K. and trained as a painter extensively in English art schools, beginning at Stourbridge College of Art, graduating at Birmingham College of Art and doing post graduate studies at Central Schools and Goldsmiths College, London before making Jamaica her home in 1970. 
For forty years she has embraced and influenced creative expression and the education process through her dedication to teaching art, first at the secondary school  level and then at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. 
Although the Jamaican environment is an important inspiration in her work and her iconic paintings of Jamaican women have gained a permanent place in popular culture, Samere's imageries have reflected many influences and sources, including mythology, feminism, nature, figuration and the constructed realities conveyed by still-life 
Samere synthesizes her view of the natural world through an unblinking attention to line and form, colour and tone, in order to create a calm space where the subject can be observed, rendered pure and still, outside of time and space, existing for itself alone. 
Her still-life pieces "evoke a quality of time, captured and stilled, caught in the reflected gleam of a silver knife, the falling shadow of a tablecloth's soft fold, the pure white bowl holding the muted crimson of heaped ripe mangoes." And her flower studies "build a private botany which is all their own, moving from the finest detail, (the powdered pollen dusting the stamen of a Regal Lily) to construct the lovingly wrought whole, where leaf and blossom, tendril and bud all combine to create a luxurious architecture, immobile and glowing".

Samere has exhibited widely and her work has been included in Jamaican Art shows in Miami, Los Angeles and New York - with solo shows in Bermuda and the United Kingdom and many in Jamaica. Since 1984 her paintingshaveformed part of the Permanent Collection of the National Gallery of Jamaica and hang in many private and corporate collections in the Caribbean, the U.S. and the U.K.