Renay Smith – Artist Biography

Renay Smith is a landscape artist based on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Her early career as a Graphic Designer evolved into painting and print-making. In recent years, her creative practice has encompassed a love of the Australian bush and landscapes that consider the near and far.

Her paintings are intimate, the viewer becoming an adventurer in natural and cultivated settings. Renay’s work explores the rich palette of Australian foliage, strong light and never-ending details. She has a fascination with how the intense luminosity of the southern hemisphere affects hues, contrast and perceptions of space.

An ‘Eastern’ or planar perspective pervades her images, foreground earth-bound objects such as rocks and trees overlay a middle distance with the background plane representing ’heavenly’ elements of hills, mountains and sky.

Sketching and noting her journeys, Renay paints her images from her experiences and impressions. She works mainly in acrylic on canvas, manipulating her mediums to give a rich and lush texture to her surfaces. Linocut printmaking, with strong graphic elements of landscape and quirky objects represented in mono relief printing and colour washes is her other creative focus.

Renay’s work has appeared in group exhibitions across NSW and her paintings, both exhibited works and commissioned pieces are with interstate and overseas collectors. Her influences include Fauvism, Japanese printmaking and traditional Chinese art.