Sam Cartman is from Shropshire in England. After living and working in Scotland for a number of years he is now back in his native County. He studied at Cumbria College of Arts and Design gaining a BA (Hons) in Fine Art.

Sam Cartman produces paintings inspired by the Scottish landscape. Typically his art works are shaped by the experience of being in a certain place at a certain time and the memory of the event. These experiences are the basis for Cartman's involvement with the paint, and from then on, his interaction with the paint takes over. The process allows Sam to show in painting, something of the place he is in or has been in, whether it’s the landscape of Shropshire, Cumbria or more recently, the urban environment of Glasgow and the landscapes of the Scottish West Coast.

Sam Cartman creates a feeling of space by the use of large blocks of paint and careful compositions. There is real skill in Sam's approach and a detailed understanding how to make ‘negative space’ work so well. The large areas of colour in his paintings reinforce the power and grandness of nature.

Talking about Sam Cartman's paintings Jan Patience (The Glasgow Herald) says: ‘There is a poetic sparseness to Cartman’s paintings of wide open spaces, in the skies or the sculpted buildings which look as if they have been there for all time. His paintings are like memories: fixed and definite in our mind’s eye but not perfect and all the better for the instinctive use of paint and the tools he applies it with’. Although inspiration for Sam's work often comes from visiting singular architectural structures in specific rural places, he primarily uses these buildings to provide a structure or form to paint within. Any illusions to representing a particular place masks what he is really interested in, which is to figuratively paint an abstract picture.