Karen Smidth | Pacific Edge

Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Pacific Edge, a collection of new paintings by Karen Smidth. In Pacific Edge, the Bay Area-based Danish artist shares landscapes and interior still life paintings that were created or completed during California’s shelter-in-place orders. Painting with oil on linen in subdued yet sumptuous planes and blocks of color, the artist creates quietly mesmerizing scenes of life in Northern California. Pacific Edge offers a contemplative glimpse into a deep sense of looking deeply at the world and the value of slowing down to appreciate our surroundings. 

Smidth started her career in image-making as an illustrator and graphic designer. She began her career by taking drawing classes, which led to what she describes as an obsession with painting. Largely influenced by a range of landscape artists from J.M.W. Turner to Emil Nolde, Smidth is driven by an impulse to translate the ephemeral emotion of a singular moment through the act of painting. She often drives through the California terrain, camera in hand, for the express purpose of capturing a transitory vista, which she later translates through paint in her Berkeley studio. Smidth, who spent the first 25 years of her life in Denmark often describes her work as a way to reckon with the feeling of being an outsider. By painting the new world around her she has found a way to make California her home.