Lush resin mixed media paintings by Susan Goldsmith take the spotlight at Gallery Henoch in an exhibition opening this April. Goldsmith bucks conventional painting for works that mix modern and traditional materials. An opening reception with the artist will be held Thursday, April 18th, from 6 – 8pm. The event is free and open to the public.

Susan Goldsmith’s paintings focus on the cycles of nature, sunlight and shadow, time’s passage, and human perception. Much of her subject matter comes from exploration—hiking the mountain landscapes surrounding Jackson Hole, Wyoming and roaming Central Park in New York City. She often presents the cropped compositions in a series, as triptychs and diptychs, constructing for the viewer what amounts to glimpses of nature viewed as a sequenced set. In presenting only slices of nature, Goldsmith allows each tree blossom to transmit its own lucid energy. Goldsmith then suspends the images in transparent resin over reflective panels, gilt in silver or gold leaf, giving them a shimmering ephemeral quality. Art writer Patricia Albers observes that, “As one angles around a Goldsmith, light as fickle and delicious as nature’s asserts the beauty of her subject, shifts, mirrors the room, and then fades.”

While certain of Goldsmith’s methodologies derive from traditional painting, it is also informed by working on feature films for Lucas Digital Arts and Industrial Light & Magic. She employs animation techniques like rotoscoping (the tracing of film) in her painting. By approaching her work from the perspective of cinematography, Goldsmith began to master light as a medium. Goldsmith’s gold and silver leaf panels allow light to bounce and reflect through the paints and prints encased in transparent layers of resin, taking every advantage of a color’s optic vibrancy. These richly hued compositions appear to glow before the viewer and transmit a contagious radiance.

Susan Goldsmith’s studio is based in California, where she attended Cal. Arts, Oakland. She received her BFA in 1977 for printmaking and drawing and a MFA, in 1992, for painting and drawing. She has been included in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of Art, CA, the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, CA, The Marin Arts Council, CA, the US Art in Embassies Program, and in NHK Broadcasting Corporation’s “One Heart, One World,” which traveled to New York, USA; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Paris, France; Hanoi, Vietnam; Sydney, Australia; and Tokyo, Japan.