Teresa Smith

Teresa Smith paints the soul of the West Coast landscape from her remote island home on San Juan Island, Washington. Surrounded by giant fir trees and the Salish Sea, she gathers impressions of the land on horseback rides with her Irish wolfhound and works in oil — richness of color, intimate brushwork, and the interconnectedness of nature as her sustained subjects. She holds a contemplative arts degree from Naropa University, and her practice reflects that training: paintings unfold rather than declare, allowing the work to find its own form.

Each painting begins with a loose, drippy underpainting in burnt sienna — a layer of accident and rawness that the finished work is built around, not against. From there she works layer by layer with painterly brush marks, some thick and some thin, always preserving the first raw layer beneath the polish. Her major influences are Georgia O'Keeffe, Emily Carr, and Canada's Group of Seven — painters who taught her the value of a direct connection with nature over inherited convention. "Much of today's art is based on concept," she has said. "I do contemplative painting, which is different. It is allowing the painting to unfold in a contemplative or meditative way."

Her subjects emerge through lyrical brushwork: cathedral firs, the shifting tide, light through stained-glass canopy. In addition to painting, Smith is a master gardener who grows food year-round and works in the community to diagnose plant problems. Her studio is on the top floor of a barn overlooking pond and trees, where deer walk by and ducks swim. The interior life of the place is, in a real sense, the work itself.