There’s just too much stuff out there. It can be overwhelming, right? With the pervasiveness of social media in our everyday hand-held lives, almost every corner of the world is now open and available. Media is constantly zooming towards us and the response options are as follows: like, share, or keep scrolling. Then we just keep going because don’t want to miss anything, but as a result we devour without thought or emotion.
It’s rare that I come across a visual that truly draws something from within me. When I say rare, I mean social-media-rare like probably once every few weeks. This is even truer for the ever elusive “art world”. Luckily, there are people churning beauty every single day… like Samantha Keely Smith.
Her oil-painted universe is a turbulent crash of land, sky, sea, and self. Samantha writes:
In order to truly appreciate beauty and light, one must allow for the necessity of the dark. Order and chaos, the cerebral and the instinctive, sacred and profane- each requires the other.
This is a space where there is the opportunity to begin to accept chance and accident. A place where one can surrender, if only for a moment, to loss of control and the freedom that this can bring, and where the boundaries of place and time are not relevant.
She really hit it on the nail, didn’t she. Balance (and imbalance) of duality is the tight rope we walk through life. We hear about it all the time – head and heart, left and right brain, nature vs nurture. Keely Smith shows us the beauty of this dissonance and in doing so, proves that it is this dissonance that gives us life.
[ images via artist website and tumblr ]
