Rene Smith

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René Smith's pastel drawings begin with photographs accumulated through everyday life—domestic interiors, neighborhood walks, family snapshots, vacations, and moments with friends. Working from these images, she creates layered drawings in soft pastel on sanded paper, a surface that holds dense accumulations of pigment while preserving its luminosity. The process is immediate and tactile: no brush or medium, only the hand and a stick of pastel, allowing the physical qualities of the material to remain fully present.

The work explores the distance between lived experience, photography, and memory. Slow, sustained looking transforms casual snapshots into spaces of prolonged attention, where recollection and observation begin to overlap. Rather than reconstructing a faithful image, the drawings linger in moments of uncertainty, allowing forms to remain partially unresolved and inviting ambiguity to become an active part of the work.

Material surfaces—wood grain, tangled hair, oversaturated light, sand, cactus spines, foliage, and fabric—become sites of close investigation. Through repeated layering and subtle shifts of color, these familiar textures move beyond description toward something more atmospheric and psychological. The images function simultaneously as records of lived experience and as formal problems, balancing specificity with openness and recognition with abstraction.

René Smith lives in Oakland, California, and works in Berkeley, where she founded Berkeley Painting Club, a community studio offering art classes for teens and adults. She received an M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art and a B.A. in Painting from Bennington College. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Italy, and Thailand. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Et Al in San Francisco**.** She has taught painting at institutions including Chiang Mai University, Temple University Rome, Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art & Design, and St. Thomas Aquinas College.

rene@renesmith.net

studio: Strawberry Creek Park Art & Design Building