Samantha Keely Smith’s paintings of pulsating, violent vistas straddle the line between the psychological and the physical, her landscapes emanating a fiery potency that brings up images of Gods at war, unbridled emotions, a world in chaotic disharmony.
These pictures border on the supernatural, they conjure up our deepest desires and torments, they exorcise our dreams and nightmares, seek to visualise the plight of being human, aware of our mortality, our existence, fragile and peripheral in the face of the power of nature. Humanity need not apply.
Smith’s use of colour on an emotional level echoes the work of the great 18th and 19th Century Romantic painters such as J.M.W.Turner who raised landscape art to an interior dialogue in which we searched ourselves for meaning and questioned our relationship to the world around us. It is this exploration of the interior landscape and transposing it into whirlwind of cataclysmic fury that elevates Smiths paintings to grandeur, provides us with the link to a history that seen generations of painters attempt to capture vitality, soul and life. Here’s what she has to say about her work:
My images are not at all real places or even inspired by real places. They are emotional and psychological places. Internal landscapes. The tidal pull and power of the ocean makes sense to me in terms of expressing these things, and I think that is why some of the work has a feel of water about it. My work speaks of things that are timeless, and I think that for most of us the ocean represents something timeless.
I think my work sometimes gets compared to artists like Turner and church, because at a certain point their work was speaking in almost purely emotional terms and approached semi-abstraction. I work in a way that has much in common with nineteenth century landscape painting on both a technical and visual level, but this is not a conscious choice on my part. I work in colours that I feel best reflect the images that come to me, and the emotions that those images stir up.
I always wanted to express things that were not dependent on any boundaries of place, language, time, etc., and I hope that my work speaks to the essence of our desires and fears as human beings