Samuel T. Scholtes is a multi-disciplinary, self-taught artist whose practice functions as an  act of alchemical translation, transforming lived experience into palpable energy across  painting, poetry, and sonic architecture (performing as ZORB). Born and raised in South  Bend, Indiana, Scholtes brings a life lived between extremes, corporate business experience, blue collar environment, and survival through addiction, to work that reads as a map of resilience and  renewal. 

In painting he works in a language he calls Energetic Abstraction: a spontaneous,  intuitive method that largely abandons the brush in favor of a painting knife, cutting,  flinging and lashing pigment onto canvas and wood. Dense, tactile surfaces and a bold  chromatic dialogue (Neo-Expressionist saturations balanced with grounding whites and  blues) allow forms to emerge pareidolically, Maidens, paired figures, and other mythic  motifs that anchor the work in archetypal stories of duality, loss, and transformation. Scholtes’s practice is not decorative; it is a living apparatus for encounter, intended to  jolt, to open, and to return viewers to the sacred immediacy of the present. His music  releases as ZORB, Back at my House (2024) and Feelin’ Foxy (2025), and live  performances in the Pacific Northwest intertwine with his visual work. Scholtes lives and  works in Bend, Oregon.