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It started at a coffee table.
Not a studio. Not a gallery. A coffee table in college — the kind of surface that accumulates rings and notebooks and half-finished thoughts nobody expects to turn into anything. Sam Winner and his friend Gio sat there every day and drew. No grand ambitions. No artist statements. Just the act of putting something on paper because the day felt incomplete without it.
That ritual never stopped. It just evolved.
Today, Sam works under the name Seek Joy — painting, drawing, and making ceramics that feel like pages ripped from someone's life and pinned to the wall for the rest of us to see. His pieces are part journal, part love letter to the people closest to him. There's an intimacy to the work that you don't have to understand art to feel. You just look at it, and something connects.
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Sketchbooks to metal panels.
What makes Sam's work hard to pin down — in the best way — is the range. The sketchbooks are dense, detailed, obsessive in the way that only daily practice produces. Flip through one and you can feel the hours. The pen never fully lifts off the page.
Then there are the metal panel pieces — bold, physical, the kind of work that changes the energy of whatever room it's in. Going from the intimacy of a sketchbook to the weight of a painted metal surface is a shift most artists wouldn't attempt. Sam moves between them like they're the same conversation in different volumes.
Why the walls matter.
At Jurassic Magic, the art on our walls isn't decoration. It never has been. It's not there to fill space or match the paint or give people something to photograph behind their latte. The walls are a reflection of the people who make this place what it is — the regulars, the neighbors, the ones who show up and keep showing up until they become part of the room itself.
Sam is one of those people.
We wanted the shop to feel like walking into someone's life, not a curated gallery. Sam's work does that without trying. There's no performance in it. No posturing. Just a person who makes things because not making them was never really an option — and a coffee shop that believes the best art comes from exactly that kind of compulsion.
His prints and zines are for sale at Jurassic Magic. Pick one up next time you're in. Hold something that someone made because they had to.
This is the first one.
We've been wanting to do this for a while — sit down with the artists, makers, and regulars who give this place its pulse and actually tell you about them. Not in a press-release way. In a "you should know this person" way.
Sam is the first. He won't be the last. Stay tuned.
