Samantha Keely Smith

After moving to the US from England as a child, Brooklyn-based artist Samantha Keely Smith went on to study art and art history at the School of Visual Arts in New York and received a BFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. Smith fell in love with oil painting after tirelessly attempting to express her emotions through writing or music; painting came more naturally to her and encouraged a sense of belonging.  Her timelessly beautiful paintings have emotional imagery and energy representing our tormented relationship with ourselves. 

“The work I’m doing at the moment definitely has a feeling of some sort of landscape or place, but they have nothing to do with real places, they are emotional and psychological places.  Light plays an important role in my work.  Because the work addresses the contrast and connections between an internal psychological space and my daily reality, they often depict dualities of light versus dark and order versus chaos.” – Samantha Keely Smith