Cheri Smith and the Pulse of the Earth

Stepping into Cheri Smith’s painted world feels like entering a terrain where bodies, plants, and animals rise from the earth as if unearthed from a deeper layer of time. Her new works revolve around a magnetic pull toward the ground: feet that sink, weeds that spread, figures that fall back into matter. The palette - raw umber, green earth, stil de grain - roots each painting in mineral tones that glow through thin, tonal layers. In these scenes, deer, dogs, snakes, bones, and wild plants recur like shifting constellations. They drift from one canvas to another, alive and symbolic at once, embodying a cycle where life and death overlap. Smith paints each figure individually, letting the environment take shape in response - a composition that mutates like a living puzzle, where forms tessellate, collide, and reorganize. Her practice blends traditional techniques with a sensibility for the primal and the strange, transforming the canvas into a porous space between observation and imagination. In Smith’s hands, painting becomes a site of emergence, where the ground is not a backdrop but a force - quietly shaping everything that grows from it.