About Brio Artist: Colette Odya Smith

My painting is my prayer.
I offer what I have been moved to create as my service.
My process is my sanity.
My intent is to create works that attract and deeply satisfy.

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The journey moves from quiet walks or stolen glimpses with my camera, through refining the composition, to a watercolor underpainting and final application of soft pastel; culminating, hopefully, in the work residing where it is useful.  The progress comes of persistent honing, of eye and hand, as well as of mind and heart.

I call these intimate landscapes.  In them I radically zoom in, crop, edit and refine to clarify that the subject is really the meaningful structure beneath each transient scene.

I love to push the congruency I find between abstraction and realism, because they are for me, a mere hair's breath apart.  I create with the same elements of dust and water that I am drawn to paint, the same ones we are made of; exploring in a material way, our relationship to the image and the actual objects.

Colette Odya Smith is an award-winning pastel painter known for her 'intimate landscapes' that convey a sense of the mysterious and the profound.  She revels in nature's lush colors and rich textures, often cropping closely to reveal inherent structure, and working at the edge of realism and abstraction.  A former art teacher, she continues to educate through her keen take on ordinary subjects and through her workshops, lectures and demonstrations.  Ms. Smish discovered pastels studying at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and has been exhibiting and perfecting her technique for the last 15 years, sometimes working them with other media such as watercolor, gold and copper leaf, India ink and hand-made papers.  Her inspiration can come from a small puddle in the sidewalk to magnificent scenery discovered on her wide-ranging travels.  She is a signature member of the Pastel Society of America, the Pastel Society of New Mexico, Landscape Artists International, Wisconsin Visual Artists (formerly Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors), and the League of Milwaukee Artists.