PaintingsDIRECT.com

by Dan Burnstein, Staff Writer

Monsoon #1 (1999)	New York, October 17th, 2000--PaintingsDIRECT.com's Dan Burnstein and Vanessa Conte interviewed painter Roxa Smith at her studio in New York City. DB: Can we start out by talking about the animals in your paintings? Hippos, for example. RS: They're very fierce animals actually. People don't know that much about them. I use them as a prop. I have more of an attachment to penguins. They have this human quality to them. I love the theme of animals because they're fun and funny and you can play a lot with the roles that they work in.
DB: It seems like, aside from the obvious, that the interiors that have animals and ones that don't are different, fundamentally. RS: Yeah, they're more conscious--the ones with animals--they're almost trying to comment. The ones without animals are not interiors that I found looking through magazines or a picture library. They're more drawn from my personal experience.
DB: Your friends' apartments aren't actually in these colors, though, right? RS: Oh, no, of course not.
DB: When you're painting, are you thinking "I've gotta have a nuclear orange here," and then you go out and get it, or do you keep them around? RS: You can do a lot with mixing. I don't believe in buying a particular color just because I need it. I will spend a long time sometimes mixing colors. It's sort of like cooking. I was born and raised in Venezuela. I don't know if you've been there, but it's like all Latin American countries; it's very hot in the sense that the people are hot, the weather is hot, the colors are hot. The way people dress, the way people decorate their homes, the way people paint their houses. The biggest influence that I have from Latin America is my sense of color.			Strays (1998)
DB: Where do you get these Orientalist interiors, the architecture? RS: I go to the picture library a lot in the Mid Manhattan Library, and I've always had a fascination with India. I've done yoga for 15 years, I went to India, and I also love architecture. I was particularly interested in arches for a while, and I found you could see a lot of great arches in Indian architecture of palaces. My way of working when I'm going through images is that I'm just drawn to something, and that's what I'll work from. I've always liked architecture, my mom is an architect, and had I pursued a "career," I would probably have gone for architecture.
VC: The space in your paintings is always very clear and evident. You have a good, almost intuitive knowledge of the way space is laid out. RS: I never formally studied perspective. It's a matter of practicing what's right. Sometimes they're quirky, and I don't mind that, but it is something that comes pretty naturally. VC: Do you do a lot of preliminary work? RS: Some artists will do a lot of sketches before going on to the canvas. I like working on the canvas directly because otherwise I sort of lose the energy that I'm working from. I'll spend sometimes hours working out a composition before I even start painting, and then I'll spend hours mixing colors. Some of them take a long time. The cat one with the penguins took a long time to figure out what I wanted to do. I had the interior space figured out, but to put in the imagery I wanted took a little bit more practice. At one point, the cat was in a cage, and then it was out of the cage; there were bigger penguins, and then smaller penguins. That's what I love about oil paint; it's very forgiving, and you can work with it, sand it off, put it back in.			Dark Party (1999)
		Interview continued... page 2