source: laimyours

We usually don’t look below the Orange Curtain for posts nor were we searching for one but artist Sarah Smiley demanded that we share what she was up to. Sarah is a San Diego based artist who recently finished up school at RISD. Her work goes beyond canvases and deals with what happens with when you bend the confines of representation and how images are contained. Smiley’s artwork is somewhere in between paintings and sculptures.

Her work is literal and abstract and very playful. They’re a bit like impressionist paintings that have forgotten how to compose themselves and reveal their nuts and bolts: they’re art pieces that have had one too many cocktails. For example, both the top image and above left deal with movement and sports equipment, a basketball specifically. With a little line, spring, and melted paint, you get the action and gesture of the the ball in quite a humorous, bare bones way. The below painting of a skyline melting away or glass of water without a bottom follows similarly, too.

It’s an easy effect and this point of view is seen in her more stark works (above right) and more traditional works (bottom). We’re really into her work and are pumped to have stumbled upon it. Who knows: maybe we’ll have to start dipping down into San Diego for more artists to share. Time will tell.