Amanda Smith - Misheard Landscapes

Doily Dam. 2017. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 11 x 14"

Fenster, 2017. Oil and acrylic on panel. 11 x 14"

Chartreuder, 2017. Oil and acrylic on panel. 11 x 14"

Geothermal, 2017. Oil and acrylic on panel. 11 x 14"

Archibana, 2017. Oil, acrylic, and paper on panel. 11 x 14"

untitled, 2017. Oil, acrylic, and paper on panel. 11 x 14"

Grass Patch, 2017. Oil, acrylic, and paper on panel. 11 x 14"

Pool Parts, 2017. Acrylic and latex on panel. 11 x 14

A Gesture Alone, 2017. Oil and acrylic on panel. 26 x 30"

Seed Library, 2016. Paper collage and acrylic on panel. 14 x 11"

untitled, 2017. Acrylic, vinyl, and charcoal on canvas. 14 x 11"

Hedgewitch, 2017. Oil, acrylic, and paper on panel. 14 x 11"

2017. Oil, acrylic, and paper on panel. 14 x 11"

Basement Heavy, 2017. Oil and acrylic on panel. 14 x 11"

My recent small works are motivated more by an attitude than by anything concrete: how can I surprise myself and still have some command over what I am painting? I think of these images as "misheard landscapes," or spaces where slippages in cognition can take solid and convincing form without being necessarily intelligible or explicable. As a pretty restless thinker and maker, I reorganize obsessively as a method to access mystery from ordinary places and circumstances.