Profile: Melinda Smith

Plein-Air Painter, '91

Plein-Air Painter Smith '91 Captures Aura of the Southwest

Melinda Smith ’91 fell in love with art and Santa Fe at the same time, so it’s no surprise that her paintings capture the vibrant interplay between the Southwest’s pure light and its cleanly defined topography. It’s more of a surprise to learn that love affair started early — she was only three when her parents started collecting art in Santa Fe and providing her with tools so she could create her own art at home.

Now Smith is a plein-air painter, one who carts along a small easel so she can set her view directly onto the canvas rather than taking photographs for later use in the studio. “Painting outside is not glamorous,” Smith says. “It’s hot, or cold; it’s windy. But it’s rewarding. Later, I go back to the studio and see what I have. Some do well as large paintings, but it’s hard to get the same vitality into them.”

Currently, Smith is working on commission for Great Outdoors Colorado, painting landscapes of each of the 20-plus “Legacy Projects” — big plots of land GOCO is turning into open space. Smith hopes the series will remain a collection, and that someone will underwrite a statewide traveling exhibit “so that everyone can see what GOCO is doing.”

During her CC years, Smith spent her time in the studio, working at life drawings in the classic styles as taught by the late Jim Trissel. Then her work took a more modern turn, she says: “Very abstract, big color studies, more Mondrian. After I left CC, I interned in a Santa Fe gallery and ended up living there five years, submerged in art.

“Something about the Southwest is so inspiring. It’s the aura, the smells, the serenity, the big skies… especially in the fall. The air gets crisp, but it’s still warm. You can smell burning piñon. My palette is very ‘high key,’ with lots of blues and greens, so I love doing water, cloudscapes, arroyos with that warm pink dirt. I love the blues of the huge skies and the green of the sage.”

After her Santa Fe sojourn, Smith married her college boyfriend, Chris Haymons ’92, now a mergers and acquisitions investment banker with Headwaters MB in Denver. They have a daughter Alexandra, nearly two, whose presence has made Smith’s studio time more sporadic, but Smith says, “I can’t wait to take her out in the field to paint with me. It will be so wonderful to share that. Plein-air isn’t taught much to children, but they absorb it all so much faster: how to make the painting recede, how the light refracts, how to gray things down toward the horizon. At some point, I’d also like to come down to CC and take some students outside to paint. A lot of artists are very private people. I have that quality too, but I also love to share great things with other people.”

Melinda Smith's paintings of the Southwest appear on the cover and throughout the issue of the Bulletin. See more at www.melindasmithstudio.com.