Barbara Lee Smith has a distinguished career as a teacher, lecturer, published author, and curator. But foremost in her work life has always been her career as a studio artist. Smith’s travels to teach, which include the United States, Europe and Asia, inform both her landscape images and tool box of techniques. The surfaces of her pieces dance with active bits of color and shapes which dissolve into a whole. The mellow colors present as realism through a soft filter. Smith says about her landscapes “I like to blur fact and fiction in my approach to nature.” She describes a place in a dream-like memory, as in “Point No Point,” a location just north of her home/studio on Raft Island in Puget Sound. The ocean is stirring and mist conceals details, yet the viewer is surrounded by the essence of this place.

Prior to a trip to Italy, Smith created “Anticipating Umbria l.” Her thoughts were shifted from the blues and greens of her own landscape on the coast of Washington to the rusts, ochre’s, umbers, cinnabars, sage greens, and warm grays of the Italian countryside. Smith is not seeking the heroic or sentimental qualities of landscape but the pulsating meaning of the earth. She seeks not to describe landscapes but her experience of them. Smith states: “I don’t try for realism in my work. I try for believability.”

“JETTY II”
Synthetic fabric: painted, printed, collaged, fused and stitched
30" x 50"

In “Warm View from a Cool Place” Smith captures her sensitivity to changes in light and subtle alterations brought on by time. She captures a moment and makes it all moments. In this landscape Smith leans toward warmer tones giving an overall effect of a sun bathed landscape. Grasses appear to wave in the foreground, beckoning the viewer to enter an unknown Mediterranean blue waterway with mountains rising in the far background. The light is strong and dazzling. The viewer is caught midway between reality and illusion.

Smith’s technique is profoundly her method of assembling elements to make a whole – painting, collage, and stitching. Barbara works on a web based industrial fabric called Lutradur. While seeking a material that would absorb color, fabric dyes or acrylic paint, in the same manner as paper, a student in Germany suggested Lutradur might be suitable. As evidenced by its use for almost 20 years, it is solid, archival, and a perfect surface for the large gestural strokes that mark the beginning of each piece. After the ground is established,

“ANTICIPATING UMBRIA I”
Synthetic fabric: painted, printed, collaged, fused and stitched
35" x 41"

Barbara begins tacking on shapes of the same material painted and cut to fit the desired outcome. The piece is pinned to the wall and many trials and errors take place at this juncture. Smith moves back and forth, studying the image from an intimate viewpoint and from a distance, until the desired scene emerges. As the foreground is established the pieces are fused in place in layers. The final and a lengthy step is to machine stitch the entire surface in patterns that resembles a topographical map. Is Smith mapping out life experiences, or giving another dimension to the already complex surface in an effort to further describe. The colors of the top stitching change to further meld the layers into a whole.

An early book authored by Smith, “Celebrating the Stitch,” is still considered the seminal book for artists wishing to create using stitching. Smith has never wavered from her passion for
hand or machine sewing as a method for art making. She was an early pioneer and remains a powerful figure to artists unafraid to reject traditional methods of making art. Barbara Lee Smith has broken many rules for telling her story in a visual language and continues to do so. Her work can be found in museums and private collections across the world. Smith is an artist that finds gentle beauty in the rich variety of landscapes that dot the universe. A brilliant observer of details and synthesizer of vast spaces, she brings into our awareness a new space.

Smith cites the words of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, as a guide in her personal artistic path:

“Each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. In this way we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. But they need to be written according to the shapes of our inner landscapes.”

Barbara Lee Smith’s inner landscapes are defined in the pieces she has prepared for “POETIC LANDSCAPES.”