About the Drawings

Rachel Wolfson Smith is a mother, daughter, wife, and woman, and these roles are at once nourishing, complex, and challenging. Using herself as a model, she explores emotional landscapes under the guise of drawn landscapes.

Her drawings take cues from nature and instances of non-verbal communication throughout time—the gesture of a woman’s hand in a centuries-old portrait, a rebel plant pushing through the sidewalk, a pause in a film—and look at the dialogue between what is said and what is shown. The resulting artworks blend cycles of beauty, overwhelm, collapse, and lightness together into atmospheric landscapes that mirror the emotional or mental states that she accesses during the drawing process. Listening to books, music, and podcasts while drawing and jotting notes onto the paper further connect me with the inner experiences of others and herself. Partially legible words remain visible among the leaves in the finished drawings, offering glimpses into these worlds. Accumulations of pencil marks become archives of labor and care, and the heavy handed erasures are physical reminders to let go to make space for the future.

Guided by nature, Smith’s practice reconnects her with the nature within us all. The act of drawing is how she processes being a modern woman. The drawings are artifacts of this ongoing evolution.

About the Artist

Smith lives with her family in Amsterdam, but grew up on a small farm outside of Baltimore. Her parents were naturalists who ironically also ran a landscaping company. Their lives revolved around curating nature: at home they worked to keep their land as wild as possible, but meticulously controlled its wildness for clients. It was during this time that Smith recognized the potential of the landscape as another way to communicate, and started her lifelong collaboration with it. Both the freedom and majesty she observes in nature and the organization and structure of recreating it have voices in her work.

Her interests outside of her studio go wide. You’ll also find her reading, exploring, raising emotionally healthy kids, riding motorcycles, researching, practicing wellness, going to the cinema, getting dressed, studying color, visiting gardens, and giving speeches at her Toastmasters club.

Additional works by RWS can be found via

Instagram @wolfsonsmith

Ivester Contemporary, in Austin, TX

& book recommendations, here

Why I Landscape

an essay by RWS

I grew up on a small farm in Maryland. My parents were naturalists who also ran a landscaping company. They controlled nature for clients, while keeping the woods surrounding their own home as native and wild as possible. So I inherited a funny relationship with honoring and taming nature. In college I fell in love with landscape painting—hefting all my supplies outside and standing there for hours trying to catch the color, space, and light, just so. But after graduate school I gave it up to draw instead. Drawing allowed me to celebrate the light even more. I still loved color, but it complicated the immediacy of things and I wanted to construct my own worlds instead of depicting what was already there. The drawings became very large and imagined landscapes took form on the paper from many different images and sources. I also began researching psychology and what emotions communicate, and that’s filtered into the landscapes I draw.

Beauty and the visual rhythms of nature have always enamored me, but I struggle with the kind of beauty that is artificial to the point that it needs a lot of intervention to look good, or that can only look good when groomed one particular way. I like things to be a little wild, doing their thing and stopping their growth only when they’re happy to stop. It reminds me that people are probably happiest that way too.

My husband and I bought a house in Austin with a bare yard and a few ill-placed trees. A local landscaping company designed a plan for us, and while it didn’t hit the mark it broadened my imagination of what the space could be. I’ve always been interested in permaculture, native plantings, and Dutch dream meadows—a particular planting style that looks like a meadow but even more aesthetically pleasing. I spent the next year researching gardens and learning about native Texas plants and trees. We constructed a native yard in the particular palette I wanted, which grew easily within the weather conditions and city restraints, and it only gets dreamier as time goes on and the trees grow taller.

Just prior to this, I visited the Netherlands to research a Dutch garden for a new series of drawings, and two years later my husband and I relocated to Amsterdam to continue that research. The Netherlands is one of the only countries whose land mass is expanding, as they are constantly building artificial sand bars in the sea to make more space. Amsterdam is essentially a city built on sand with cloud cover most of the year. Given its challenges, it’s quite interesting how the Dutch integrate nature into urban planning. They turn to plants to solve structural problems like stopping the sand from washing away while simultaneously creating a cozy natural environment within a bustling urban center. Being in nature also helps offset depression, which is a common side effect from the lack of sun, and it’s easy to access here.

We had two children here who are still quite little. An unexpected effect of motherhood is that my capacity for chaos has increased so much that many of the ideas and processes in my work no longer feel dynamic enough. While my creative output is bound by time and attention, this period has brought me a tremendous influx of ideas. My mind works more like a prism now. I imagine spaces dimensionally in a way I couldn’t before, and it’s expanding the visions I have for my work and their scale. This ever growing list of ideas taps into the ways nature and people collaborate—throughout history, in imagined futures, by gender, and through the commoditization of beauty. Many involve large environments, physical gardens, or plants—real or constructed—reimagined to coexist in spaces that people use. And now these ideas are coming to life.

-Rachel

Video and original score by Richard Carpenter