Teresa Smith grew up in rural eastern Canada — deep woods, an intimate knowledge of how forest light works, how a trail smells after rain. She carried that formation across the continent to San Juan Island in Washington State, where she now lives with her horses, Irish wolfhounds, and giant fir trees. The view from her studio is Mount Baker and the Salish Sea. She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Naropa University and is also a master gardener — years of immersion in the plant world that is directly present in her paintings. She paints the forests and waterways she lives inside: lagoons, old-growth cedars, the spaces between branches where filtered light gathers, the creek corridors thick with late-season color.
She paints large. Her two works at JG run 36x48 and 48x60 inches — the scale required to let a forest painting breathe and to give the viewer the feeling of standing inside it rather than looking at a picture of it. Her process begins with a thin, drippy underpainting — raw, spontaneous, not contrived — and that first layer is never covered completely. What she then adds in oil paint, layer by layer, preserves the initial rawness while building toward a polished, interlocking surface of light and color. She has described her finished paintings as “a mosaic of light, weaving and interlacing patterns and color. Like stained glass, they represent the mystery beneath the surface, the layer woven between worlds.”
She is influenced by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr, and The Group of Seven — the Canadian painters who understood that the northern forest was not a backdrop but a subject, and that painting it required a specific chromatic and structural intelligence — and by Brian Rutenberg, whose American forest paintings work through color compression and surface density. She exhibits her work in the US and Canada and has participated in Art Vancouver and the Island Museum of Art in Friday Harbor. Her paintings are in private and corporate collections worldwide. She is a member of Artist Trust, the Healing Power of Arts and Artists, and the Federation of Canadian Artists.
I am in the woods. Lagoon to my left, giant cedars on the right. Mist rises in a thin veil as if illuminating an alternate world. There is a sense of mystery and a feeling of comfort and peace; a magical embrace in a cathedral forest provides sanctuary. I paint an island as sanctuary. A woodland temple and shelter from the storm.
