In a time when the word icon can mean anything from commercialized images that flood the media to religious icons, the paintings of Linda Smith help to fill a void in contemporary life. In a complex stressful world, her paintings offer a place for quiet meditation, without a specific doctrine.
Linda Smith’s figurative paintings emerge from a reverence for the history of art in a time when our natural world is in peril. The settings for Smith’s compositions are dominated by sky and water. People, animals and plants that inhabit the spaces become symbols, like images from dreams that transform and inform our reality.
These Secular Icons, decidedly of this earthly realm, evoke a range of emotions and suggest various interpretations. In Force of Nature a woman stands on a deserted beach surrounded by a variety of birds, the only species to inhabit land, sky and sea. Subliminal Sky portrays a young man with a lizard perched on his shoulder looking at the expanse that surrounds them. Other titles, Kindred Spirits, Nocturne and Journey, are clues. Yet, the narratives remain illusive leaving the particular meaning of a painting up to the viewer.
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