Friday, June 21, 2013

BEAUTY: Painting--Samantha Keely Smith

The entrancing, luminous work of Samantha Keely Smith is full of mystery.

Her Artist's Statement:
"Smith's artwork represents a striving to reconcile the inner world of instinct and the tidal sweep of our emotional life, with an external world that is both beautiful and hostile in its natural grandeur. She attempts to map the place where these worlds intersect.

The translucent layers of paint, contrasting soft ethereal brushwork and harder edged sweeping gestures, echo this divergence and depict a timeless place that hovers between dream and reality in a way that is simultaneously alluring and menacing. The work exhibits the struggle between and among the variety of human impulses: impulses that are as necessary as they are contradictory, and which therefore constantly undermine our psychic and social coherence even as they endow us with vitality, soul, and life."


Top to bottom: Invocation; Surrender; Swallow; Tether; Transmission

http://samanthakeelysmith.com/


Smith's marvelous swirls and glowing fog banks remind me so much of the Romantic/Impressionist work of J.M.W. Turner, particularly his later works in which he was painting luminosity, with physical objects more of an afterthought.


Top to bottom: Rain, Steam and Speed; The Slave Ship; The Fighting Temeraire

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