Photography by Paul Morel.
Art is a way of processing life. Once you have grown to be your own person and you can analyse patterns of behaviour, you realise that even as an adult, you are still carrying your inner child within you. The past has left scars that take time to heal. Artist Solange Smith started painting as a way of facing herself and her life. Even in her childhood, she used her own bedroom as a portal to figure out the world. Rather than escaping reality, she started to paint as a way of understanding. When fully immersed in a painting, Solange describes the act as losing herself completely, but in the truest form of reality. She defines reality as the space you create when your mind and body acknowledge a certain emotion in moments when you are fully letting yourself go. Being vulnerable can be terrifying, but as Solange grew older, she started to see the darkness within herself as only a cloud in the sky that would pass after the next storm.
As children, we mostly do what feels right. Facing and overcoming social conflict while growing up then leads to unlearning the feeling of being vulnerable. When Solange paints, the canvas provides the space for her to relearn how to explore that restricted side of herself. Once she comes out of that hole, she sees for the first time what she has been feeling. She describes the process as like a therapy session, but with the brutal difference that she is forced to see exactly what the therapist wrote. With reality fully uncovered in front of her, she can slowly come to terms with it.
When she first started painting, her figures were simple. Because Solange had to grow up young, she didn’t get to have the simplicity of a childhood. She tried to mimic this childhood in her cartoon-like style, and that took a bit of the darkness out. Though her figures were simple in the beginning, she still put hidden messages into them, like creating her own language only she could understand. As she tells her life story through paintings, she is leaving a piece of herself behind on the canvas.
Photography by Paul Morel.
A brush and a canvas weren’t always her preferred approach, though. She fell in love with street art, as we can stumble upon it in our everyday lives, and it forces us to step out of reality. When she was younger, she didn’t feel like accessing galleries, even though they were free; she never felt like she could belong there. Now, as a form of healing, she held her most recent exhibition SMILE AND PAINT US RED as an open display at Washington Square Park. The open space gives the viewer the freedom to feel any type of emotion without judgment. Anyone could choose to stay and look at it for hours or just walk by and not care.
Solange’s mother was a strong influence on her way of making art. Through her mother’s eyes, Solange learned how beautiful life can be because she could still somehow be light after all the darkness she had been through. This philosophy shaped her exhibition I AM THE BAD THAT MADE ME in which Solange conveys a message of love over hate. In her poem for the exhibition, the artist wrote, ‘I am the love I always wish I could have had’. Even after experiencing all this darkness, Solange’s acts of love come from a place of unconditional kindness, without expecting anything in return. Each painting shows the scars of healing herself. When asked if looking at them makes her sad, she shakes her head. Even though she is her own harshest critic, the paintings make her proud to have been able to release these emotions and create something out of them that will live on forever. She has found a way to take back her life and live it for herself and nobody else.
The original artwork L’enfant from 2022 is an acrylic on canvas by Solange Smith. The fine art print SLEEK EDITION of 150 copies is available for 250 Euro excl. VAT and shipping without frame. L’enfant can be purchased online as part of SLEEK EDITIONS.
Get your own fine art print edition of 150 copies of SLEEK EDITIONS x Solange Smith here.
As featured in SLEEK 79 – MOTHER. Available in print and digital here.