"Crystal Mountains", Drawings by Fiona Smyth

The Celestial Brides
written by Holly Lee

We have a big painting hanging in our bedroom. It hovers above the 5 feet x 2 and 1/2 feet table, where we keep a Wave radio and an Ikea desk lamp, a couple of smaller framed photographs, a clay bird and a dog where is actually a pair of Guardian beast of the tomb. The painting is a black and white ink wash by Fiona Smyth, that I think she had not titled it, that after two years of looking at it I would like to give it a name. I call it The Celestial Brides.

Though a large part of Fiona’s drawings and paintings inherit weird, out of this world beings and forms, they portray simply our souls and bodies, the different scapes we live in, the space of land and mind. Exhibited here is this beautiful suite of work created in 2009. Nymphs float among crystals mountains, rivers and ponds, over cones and hexagons where the energy of life gets distributed and funnelled. An infinite space where geometric optics converge and diverge, where the sorceress puts the indecipherable secrets of life under microcosmic and macrocosmic study.

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(Fiona Smyth is a Toronto based painter, educator and comic book artist. A career spanning thirty plus years, her artwork has exhibited in Canada and internationally. In 2018, Koyama Press published a collection of her works from 1985-2018 called Somnambulance.)

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