elisabeth smith studio

Ancestral Recall

This series began as a desire to represent early influences on my brother, my mother and me as allegories, told through a series of embellished family photographs. Each photograph represented a pivotal point in our lives. I enlarged each photo and transferred them onto a large roll of canvas with acrylic medium and water, then painting in acrylic over that. I wanted the work to read as a continuous scroll, ninety feet by five feet of my family's mythology in an ancient format reserved for sacred transcript. 

In addition to the impressionistic realism, I also create large abstract works that continue the dialogue around the mythology of my family record. I ask the viewer to consider distortion and representation on many levels, using symbolism and subjective abstraction as my tools.

 

The work titled “Every Day Dragons” is meant to read as a "battle scroll", and the movement within the painting is a writhing depiction of the daily cycle of victory and defeat that is my own internalized family story manifesting as a lifelong struggle with depression.