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 Abstract Surrealism: a spontaneous,  intuitive method that largely abandons planning and just painting using the brush and painting knife. “I enjoy “slabbing” paint onto canvas and wood”. From there, dense, tactile surfaces and a bold visuals allow forms and figures to emerge pareidolically, some new, some reappearing paired figures, and other mythic motifs that anchor the work in archetypal stories of presence and transformation. Scholtes’s practice is not decorative; it is a living apparatus for encounter, intended to  jolt and to return viewers to the 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.