Colette Odya Smith
Artist Statement

My painting is my prayer.
I offer what I have been moved to create as my service.
My process is my sanity.
My intent is to create works that attract and deeply satisfy.

The journey moves from quiet walks or stolen glimpses with my camera, through refining the composition, to a watercolor underpainting and final application of soft pastel; culminating, hopefully, in the work residing where it is useful. The progress comes of persistent honing, of eye and hand, as well as of mind and heart.

I call these intimate landscapes. In them I radically zoom in, crop, edit and refine to clarify that the subject is really the meaningful structure beneath each transient scene.

I love to push the congruency I find between abstraction and realism, because they are for me, a mere hair’s breath apart. I create with the same elements of dust and water that I am drawn to paint, the same ones we am made of; exploring in a material way, our relationship to the image and the actual objects.

I see my work as a forward-oriented participation in the tradition of the landscape genre. We each play our part in inventing, discovering or re-defining humanity's relationship with our environment. My exploration, while deeply personal and rooted in a life-long affinity for wet and rugged places, is my contribution to the collective aesthetic.

My 'intimate landscapes' as I call them, are filled with the stuff that once occupied the lower, nearly throwaway corners of grand history paintings. The water and stones beneath the feet of heroes and saints have come to center stage for me yet feel just as eloquent and just as evocative. What we see there depends on how we choose to look at it. For me, it’s all about what’s going on just beneath the surface, literally and metaphorically. My choice of imagery allows me endless ways to explore concepts of surface, depth, opacity, transparency, and of course, reflection. Creating with pastels and watercolor, I am charmed to be using the same elements of dust and water that I am drawn to paint.

By closely cropping and editing, I often purposely remove references of horizon and atmospheric perspective commonly dealt with in landscape. This creates issues of scale and orientation, sometimes forcing a total inversion of common perceptions. I love mixing reflected imagery with solid forms, begging the question of what is "real" and what is illusory.

The artistic tension between representational appearance and its cause and meaning plays out in the edge I walk between abstraction and realism. These are for me, a mere hair’s breath apart and I want to live in both equally and comfortably. I am looking for that perfect edge.

Colette Odya Smith Artist Statement

Colette Odya Smith
Artist Statement