We recently connected with Samantha Keely Smith and have shared our conversation below.

Samantha Keely, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

As soon as I started painting at 16 I knew that I wanted to live my life as an artist. Not only did it feel right, it felt essential for me. Up until that point I had felt lost and was longing for the feeling of belonging. Painting gave me that and it is how I navigate my life. It has helped me through several very difficult times – loss of loved ones and the long lasting (never ending) grief that goes with that, as well as being a light at the end of the tunnel when I was very ill and spent months in hospital at the age of 21. That belief, that feeling of belonging and home that I feel when I’m painting is what keeps me moving forward.

Looking to the future, I’m working towards showing with additional galleries here in the US, who will help nurture my career so that I can really focus on my studio practice, as well as with galleries in Europe and the UK, where I have collectors.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m originally from the UK and moved to the US with my family when I was 9 years old. I didn’t seriously become interested in art until I was about 16 or so. I had an extremely active dream life, with dreams that were so consuming and vivid that I often woke from them feeling that I hadn’t slept at all. I had been having these intense dreams since I was quite young and I had been looking for a way to create something with them, mainly as an attempt to understand them. I tried all the usual things, like writing and playing music, neither of which worked out, and then finally my love of music led me to see a reproduction of a painting that changed everything for me. It was ‘Head of J.Y.M.’ II, 1980, by Frank Auerbach, on the cover of the 1983 album Oil on Canvas by one of my favorite British new wave/experimental bands, Japan. It was my first time seeing a painting that spoke to me on such a visceral level.

The first day I went to a painting class (taught by an older Artist in a nearby town whose name was Charles Nevad) my fate was sealed. I walked in the door and smelled the turpentine, the oil paints, the linseed oil, and I felt at home. It felt as if I had been away on a long trip and had just come back to the place where I belonged. I got goosebumps. Painting felt so natural to me. I’m not saying there wasn’t a big learning curve, but I always had this confidence that it was going to work out. So when I decided I wanted to go to art school, it was a leap of faith, and also the first time that I met a group of people who were kindred spirits.

Today my paintings still explore the landscape of the psyche – the place where the conscious and unconscious meet. They convey a sense of place, or landscape, that can only exist on the periphery of dreams, continually coming into and out of focus. In my paintings, the existential and the personal—the exterior and the interior—are intertwined, stepping back and forth between the timelessness of dreams and the relentless cycle of change in our lives. Through the paintings I look at the delusions of order and control that we human beings cling to as we navigate the fundamental unpredictability of reality, and sense our own finiteness in the immensity of time and nature.

Throughout all of my work there is an appreciation for the fragility of life, and at the same time, our boundless capacity to feel hope. Starting from deeply personal experiences, I explore ideas and emotions that I believe many of us share, regardless of language or culture. Things like loss and grief, love and hope and joy. How sometimes it is the darkness of difficult times that shines a light on the delicate and fleeting moments of happiness and beauty in our lives.

My painting process reflects this constant push and pull between order and chaos. By using solvents and scraping to break up the still wet paint, I open up the possibility of accidental forms and marks. I respond to those results, letting them guide what comes next in the painting. This process continues over several layers, resulting in images that have both a feeling of motion and areas of complete stillness.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

Ultimately I strive to create work that explores our common humanity by delving deeply into my own personal experiences and placing those within the context of universal issues. My experiences of loss and grief and and illness, and times of joy and happiness and satisfaction, are set amongst feelings of anxiety in the constantly changing world around us. I think for many of us, these life altering experiences are sometimes more clearly seen, or understood, in our unconscious or dream life, because to face them in our day to day lives is very difficult. Painting about that place, where dreams and reality overlap momentarily, means that I have the chance to explore these feelings and make them into images that I hope communicate what is most essential about them, and therefore there will be a chance for them to resonate with people who recognize those feelings and thoughts, even though they come to them translated through my particular visual language.

This is what I hope for once I finish a painting and send it out into the world. This connection is how the artwork is completed. And this is why my ultimate goal is to have my work shown in Museums, where people will be able to spend time with my paintings and explore this world on the periphery of dreams, in their own time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://samanthakeelysmith.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/samanthakeelysmith/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SamanthaKeelySmithPainter
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/samanthakeelysmith
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamanthaKeelyS