Biography

Rashba specializes primarily in impressionistic realism, created using watercolor and charcoal. He first became fascinated with the expressive nature of charcoal when developing his senior thesis installation as an undergraduate, and continued exploring other subjects with the medium in the years following. Recently he has revisited watercolor to complement his B&W works on paper, switching between mediums and sometimes blending the two. 

While Rashba’s artistic practice is anchored in photorealism, over time he has integrated more expressive and suggestive mark-making into his pieces. His work plays with the visual tension between atmospheric texture and figurative rendering. Pulling from his background in filmmaking, he aims to create emotional yet ambiguous compositions that reveal fragments of kinetic and unsettled subjects. He applies this approach to representations of architecture, natural landscapes, the human figure and wildlife.

Rashba has been drawing and painting since he was a child, and more fully nurtured his artistic skills in the Visual Arts program at Harvard College, where he was also an illustrator for the Harvard Lampoon Magazine. He later attended the AFI Conservatory where he received his MFA in Production Design. Rashba lives and works in Los Angeles, where he also uses his creative muscles as a set designer and art director for the film industry. You can see his work in that realm at his other website www.samrashba.com.

Questions? Drop me a line at sam@rashbafineart.com