Colette Odya Smith

medium: painting

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Waterborne #1 2008 Painting	Wishing You Well 2009 Painting	Old Friends 2009 Painting
Coming Home 2009 Painting	Waterways 2011 Painting	Leafy Infusion 2010 Painting
Sunburnt 2011 Painting	The Sky is Falling 2011 Painting	Tracery 2011 Painting
Lavish Light 2011 Painting

Contact information
2471 N 81st St
Wauwatosa, WI 53213-1012
Email Address: coletteodya@smith.net
Web site: www.coletteodya.smith.net

Artist statement
These aren’t quite traditional landscape paintings, yet they are well-rooted in the genre and have their place in that tradition.

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 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.

Biography
Colette Odya Smith works primarily in soft pastels to create images that skirt the edge of realism and abstraction. She is a signature member of the Pastel Society of America, the Pastel Society of New Mexico, Landscape Artists International, and Wisconsin Visual Artists. She has received numerous awards in national exhibitions, and has had her work featured in The Pastel Journal, International Artist (formerly Pastel Artist International), Pratique des Arts and American Artist magazines. She served as a juror for The Pastel Journal "Pastel 100" and is a contributor to the book Painting Sunlight and Shadows with Pastels by Maggie Price.

Her work is in many private and public collections including the Wichita Center for the Arts. Ms. Smith lives in Wauwatosa, Wis., and is represented by the Katie Gingrass Gallery in Milwaukee, Woodwalk Gallery in Door County, Wis., and Brio Gallery in Galena, Ill.