Karen Smidth

In the early 2000s drawing and painting became my daily obsession and with it my senses were opened for what I had not been able to receive. – My heart broke to this land. My paintings are reactions to the light, color, and shapes that I see in the landscape. I use the landscape as a pattern or skeleton for what my day as a painter brings; my attempt to understand life. Most paintings have their ugly moments. They need to be wiped, sanded and over painted and this process builds their character. Some paintings have strong connections to a specific moment is time, but they all relate to a place of belonging as well as allowing room for the hue of the day. 

Smidth, who spent the first 25 years of her life in Denmark often describes her work as a way to reckon with the feeling of being an outsider. By painting the new world around her she has found a way to make California her home. This new series offers a contemplative glimpse into a deep sense of looking deeply at the world and the value of slowing down to appreciate our surroundings, to see where we are and accept it as our home.  

REMARKS, 2023

 

Karen Smidth's new collection, Remarks, centers on the Pacific landscape in emotionally evocative and sweepingly ethereal paintings. Her new body of work focuses on the idyllic scenes familiar to the Pacific coast, reimagined and re-marked as abstracted depictions from the artist's impressions and memories.  Smidth's genius lies in her relationship with color, mixed in layers directly on her linen canvas. A plane of sultry lilac might have started out a forest, an ocean hue becomes warm copper. Thinning her oil paints so they appear like a wash of watercolor allows for a glow that can only come from a complex network of translucent layers. Color is applied liberally in some areas, and sparsely in others, so that one painting might contain opposing moments of a frothy impasto white cap; close by, a charcoal mark remains intentionally legible. These subtle tensions provide a soft dynamic drama to the surface quality of the paintings. With her flat reductive approach for figuration, the artist keeps her viewers grounded in her highly abstracted scenes through a strong realistic perspective. Smidth describes the act of painting as a form of problem solving, creating worlds and places where people might want to visit or remembering what they have already done so as to provoke a memory steeped in her colors and strokes. In doing so, she invites her viewers to see nature the way she does, to imagine a natural world full of landscapes that are meant to be enjoyed, loved, and taken care of.