Erin Smith

Lives and works in Lake Charles, LA

Artist statement

I paint flowers at a scale that will not let you walk past them. The flowers are not the subject. They are how I get at self-perception and grief, and at the question of how much room a person is allowed to take up. A bloom is the most ordinary thing I know that is beautiful and already dying while you look at it. That contradiction is why I keep painting them. I work in oil, thickly. The surface is built over many sittings, and it holds every one of them. Layering and glazing let me set color against color until something charged happens between them. I would rather a painting stay open than settle into one meaning. Ambiguity is not a failure in the work. It is what lets someone bring their own life to it. Scale is deliberate. These paintings run from forty inches to nine feet. I want them to refuse to shrink, disappear, or apologize. I came to painting through photography, and I still see in frames, in light falling across a thing, in what a composition decides to leave out. I am self-taught. I live and work in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Artwork