Grand Forest

A forest interior taken vertically, and the most densely worked painting Smith has shown here. Trunks in burnt sienna and near-black run the full height while the canopy is built from her characteristic boughs — thick curved strokes of prussian and viridian, each a single loaded pass laid down and left alone. Through the middle of it a shaft of acid yellow-green opens, with fragments of blue sky caught in the gaps. There is no aperture here of the kind she usually builds, no clear way out; the light arrives between things rather than beyond them. The eye has to work, which is the point of a grove.