Blue Sky Red
Candida Stevens Gallery is delighted to present Blue Sky Red, the largest solo exhibition of Veronica Smirnoff’s work to date in the UK. Offering a unique opportunity to trace the artist’s development over the last twenty years, this exhibition showcases the artist’s expertise and commitment to the medium of egg tempera painting. Generally associated with Byzantine icons and the Italian pre-Renaissance, there are few contemporary artists using egg tempera as their primary medium today and even fewer who use it as experimentally and with as much versatility as Smirnoff. From small-scale portraits to fantastical landscapes, these are works that challenge contemporary preconceptions of the medium and draw the viewer into a realm of curious, open-ended and fantastical narratives.
The exhibition also includes the first showing of three large-scale embroideries that the artist has commissioned over the last year, exploring the effects of translating her work into textile. In each case, she has selected a small panel painting to be digitally printed onto a large piece of fabric, which has then been hand-embroidered to emphasise detail and form. Since egg tempera does not allow for the same opportunity to build texture in the same way as, say, impasto painting in oils, producing these works has been a joyful experience for the artist and provide a wonderful opportunity to see her work in an entirely new context.
It was whilst a student at the Slade School of Art (1999-2004) that Smirnoff first decided to study egg tempera, an ancient method of painting that was used throughout the world until being superseded by oil paint in the fifteenth century. Travelling to a monastery on the outskirts of Moscow, Smirnoff was taught by Russian monks who had spent their lives mastering the technique of icon painting. Taking its name from the Latin tempero (‘to combine or blend thoroughly’), tempera refers to the technical process of mixing powdered pigment with the correct ratio of water and binder, such as egg yolk, until the desired consistency is achieved. Egg tempera, which dries quickly and cannot be blended once applied, has to be painted in thin layers on a smooth surface, typically gessoed wood panels. It is a laborious process from start to finish and one that requires patience and skill.
Understanding that icons exist not only as religious images, but as beautiful and sanctified objects treated with care through every stage of their construction, has had a lasting impact on Smirnoff. As the artist puts it, “I employ process to add meaning and validity to my subjects”. This begins with the materials she uses, from oak panels ordered from the same monastery she visited over twenty years ago to her more recent venture of salvaging off-cuts of veneer from a high-end furniture maker in Germany. Each carrying their own history, the origins of these materials form the first of many layers of meaning within the artist’s work.
Compositions are compiled from a multitude of references, memories and images that the artist collects along the way. From a scene in a movie, a dress in a fashion magazine, a folk tale or piece of literature, inspiration comes to the artist in many forms. Art historical references abound, from Paolo Ucello’s charging horses and Lucas Cranach the Elder’s apple, to the techniques used to depict continuous narrative in Persian miniatures, Japanese screens and Chinese scroll paintings. Autobiographical references and personal memories filter in too, but the artist’s aim is never to make herself the subject or prescribe a certain narrative. Instead, Smirnoff enjoys that people’s own experiences of life will affect their interpretation of her work and that, in this sense, any meaning derived is co-created with the viewer.
Of all the elements involved in the creation of her work, however, it is colour that most excites Smirnoff and the exhibition title ‘Blue Sky Red’ pays homage to the two colours to which she has been repeatedly drawn throughout her practice. Frequently positioned as opposing colours in historical and cultural symbolism, from the political divisions of conservatism and communism to the associations of red with war and danger, and blue with stability and calm, they also have a shared identity within art history as colours that represent wealth, royalty and holiness. Intrigued by this relationship and the power they possess in communicating emotion, Smirnoff finds herself compelled to pair these colours within her work time and again.
Given the artist’s affinity for blue and red, it is perhaps no coincidence that it is Prussian Blue, a synthetic pigment first created by accident during the production of a red dye, that Smirnoff singles out as the most important pigment to her practice. Describing her love of the colour as something of an obsession, she is drawn to its incredible depth and ability to convey both sorrow or joy depending on the context. In a departure from the classical technique of building luminosity and colour from the white that the gesso provides, Smirnoff often begins by covering the surface with a layer of Prussian Blue, a neutral starting point that is malleable to the artist’s vision. As Smirnoff builds her compositions, applying the paint in thin layers, she is guided by the medium in unexpected ways. She describes how, as the paint dries horizontally, its surface becomes permeable and allows the detail of underlying layers to materialise by chance. In this sense, she has found a way to personalise the prescriptive characteristics of the medium and eschew its identity as a medium only suited for small-scale, highly detailed works.
Thinking of her paintings as ‘blue-sky visions’, unconstrained by any requirement to conform to traditional perspectives or realities, Smirnoff employs several techniques to ensure they retain an elusive quality. From flattened planes to the contrasting of looser, translucent forms with highly modelled sections, she distorts perspective and encourages an open-ended reading of her images. Working in this way, the artist hopes to regain something of the childhood imagination that is often lost through adult eyes, conditioned to apply logic and reasoning at the expense of wonder and magic. In Evening Annals, 2013, for example, a monumental, abstracted landscape is formed from large washes of colour and sweeping brushstrokes, overlaid with cloud-like bursts of texture and more densely applied layers of green. Cutting through the centre, a figure is cloaked in a startling blue, the folds of drapery guided by the underlying forms of the landscape that remain visible beneath. Anchored only by the fabric’s crisp outline and detailed modelling of the hand, the hooded figure’s identity and presence exists in a state of ambiguity that commands the viewer’s attention.
To Smirnoff, it is the fluidity of the human experience that intrigues her the most; life, in its fragility and delicacy, constantly oscillates between beauty and tragedy. By muddling fantasy with reality, distorting perspectives and colours, mixing cultural references and iconographies, she seeks to portray something of her own quest to understand the complexities of the world around her. She describes painting as an elusive search, forever driving her forward to create new works, challenging herself in scale and experimenting with the limits of the medium. Charting the artist’s journey to date, Blue Sky Red is a celebration of the artist’s love affair with painting and, when considering this body of work and what has sustained her motivation over the last two decades, Smirnoff’s response is resolute - “the subject always remains painting itself”.
Essay by Isabella Joughin
Spectral Chromatics: Color and the Cosmos in the Work of Veronica Smirnoff
By Darren Jones
Veronica Smirnoff’s art takes us to thresholds between worlds, where she excavates the fullness of human experience through an intricate process that is centered between oppositional forces. These binary dynamics include the individual and collective; the spiritual and corporeal; mythical and terrestrial; and the folkloric and actual. By working at the rifts between these sociological tectonics she draws our attention to the marvel and the plight of humankind as a part of the cosmic totality. Through her paintings, we are encouraged to allow wonder to permeate the mundane; apply faith as a balm to desolation; and meld our noblest and kindest attributes into the cynical and ruthless course of mankind’s most destructive appetites.
Smirnoff has developed an enigmatic cornucopia of motifs to represent her metaphysical explorations, culled from across the spectrum of human and artistic tradition. By percolating their communicative potential she has formed a visual lexicon which functions as a gentle guide, lifting our heads from the day-to-day and expanding our awareness of myriad horizons, so often diminished by the urgencies, responsibilities and stresses of quotidian existence. Her painterly range extends to figurative, abstract and landscape works, and from classical to surrealist imagery. Recurring emblems include singular, contemplative characters in enchanted settings; whirling cavalcades of people and animals; and naturalenvironments ignited by varying light, from the crepuscular, sacred hues of night to the brilliant crystalline tones of dawn. Of her reasoning, she has noted:
“I take materials, symbols, ideas and gestures from a multitude of sources and refashion them through the transformative process of painting, constantly examining and reinterpreting imagery to adapt meaning, and even to alter the expectations a viewer may have attached to them.”
Smirnoff’s aesthetic bedrock can be traced to several art-historical periods, upon which she situates the strata of her allegorical subject matter. Her unwavering commitment to the tenets of icon painting and the stylings of pre-renaissance and medieval religious art, are at the core of her creative production, not least the artist’s painstaking dedication to the ancient skill of combining pigment with yolk and wine to formulate her own egg tempera. By these means, her very brushstrokes can be seen as a metaphorical reference to the eternal cycle of birth and death through the extraction of life-giving nutrients from within their protective shell. Smirnoff’s substrates—oaken struts—which she paints on, also reference the mysticism of iconographic objects, hewn and blessed as they are in orthodox monasteries.
But the artist’s ingenuity doesn’t rest here. She conjoins elements from other canonical creeds, deftly assimilating them into her compositions. For example, the wistful, chimerical vistas of her landscapes evoke the Romantic era’s reverence for the emotional charge of the sublime. In Where the Sun also rises(2024), a molten Sun glowers at the distant edge of ocean and sky, sending a fiery trail across blue-grey water towards us. Above, the umber firmament reveals glittering points of stars and a diamond sliver of the Moon. At the shoreline, a silhouetted figure gazes out at the majestic scene, where a vessel moves into the pelagic darkness, leaving behind a smoky pall. The tremulous resonance of this painting is utterly intoxicating. And in A Fleeting evening (2024), an apparitional shadow wreathed in a bluish, hooded veil emanates a soft white glow, illuminating a forested grove in the foreground. Stately and ethereal, still and watchful, she not only silently observes the environs before her, but seems to be a figment of them, or perhaps holds dominion over them. Once more, Smirnoff locates us in a nether region that fosters consideration of what constitutes reality, or more accurately, realities. These deliberations are heightened by the translucence of the tempera, and are redolent of J.M.W. Turner’s (1775-1851), marine tempests and glass-calm eventides, or Caspar David Friedrich’s (1774-1840), fog-bound melancholies and singular panoramic wanderings.
Smirnoff’s oeuvre is also undergirded by her synchronistic threading of Pre-Raphaelite and Magical Realist tendencies. Of the former, not only can we detect stylistic traces of John Everett Millais (1829-1886), in the prone, dreamy mien of the female protagonist in Camelะต and the Eye of a Needle (2021), or the flowing red drapery cloaking an embracing couple in the astrophysical void of A kiss (2024), but also the ethos of that brotherhood. They, like Smirnoff, pooled multiple, even incongruous subjects—religious, poetical, natural, supernatural, literary—to highlight contemporary societal issues.
No less vital to understanding Smirnoff’s work is her profound and sensual ability with color—a central theme in this exhibition—not only in the potency of its visual impact, but also her astuteness for the associations we have attached to it. This is evident in the field of preternatural, midnight-blue florals, and the spectral moonlight that floods the picture plane in Master of Silence (2020), whose titular male lies prostrate and observant upon his verdant bed. And again, in Blue Bella, (2020), and Quondam (2023)—both presented here. The latter is exemplary: A bioluminescent sapphire design of whirling symbols forms a spellbinding pattern on the back of a woman’s headscarf, as she stares into the darkling air that beckons us toward a woodland glade. The shawl suggests protection and disguise. But why does she need it? Trepidatious yet intrigued, we feel compelled to follow her no matter the consequences. Blue exemplifies the value of color theory in Smirnoff’s thinking. Her rapier-sharp interplay with the essences we endow colors with are another diametric axis. Blue is the tone of relaxation and peace; it denotes adventure, exploration and hopefulness; it’s the color of contemplation, and of twilight (a diurnal transition entirely in-keeping with the artist’s sensibilities). Smirnoff goes further:
"Blue traditionally stands for loyalty, wisdom and stability; rarity (once in a blue moon), unexpected change (out of the blue), faithfulness (true blue).”
But there is a tipping point, where introspection cleaves into melancholy and depression—“to have the blues.” Smirnoff’s devotion to color calls to mind filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman’s (1942-1994), celluloid treasure, Blue. He made the film when his health was rapidly declining due to complications from AIDS, including the loss of his sight, which caused him to see increasingly in glimmers and shades of that color. Blue is not only a narration of his daily reality, medical degradations, memories and considerations on the brevity of life; he also muses on colors as if they were sentient beings, anthropomorphizing them with characteristics and even imagining them battling one another:
“Sourpuss suicide screams with evil clasping cowardly yellow belly slit-eyed.
Blue fights diseased yellow belly whose feted breath scorches the trees yellow with egg.”
“…he crawls over Eve’s rotting apple, wasplike and quick as a flash stings Blue in the mouth.”
Elsewhere, of his friends already lost to the disease, it was blue that played the grim reaper:
“Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the blue bearded weeper.”
And what of blue’s comrade and opponent, so clearly illustrated in the political division of America’s red and blue states? Red’s attributes too, cut both ways—love, warmth, sustenance, protection, intimacy, heat— “red-blooded.” And yet, invariably it is the color of obfuscation and confusion—“red tape”—and of warning, rage, violence and bloodshed. Again, we can look to Jarman who supplied red with militaristic virility:
“Red protects itself. No color is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.”
Smirnoff’s situating of these two colors as a metaphorical pendulum underpinning this exhibition is an adroit decision given the fractious state of global politics, the upcoming presidential election in the United States, and the wars that wage today around the world. Smirnoff applies a philosopher’s eye to the cultural significance of color, and a surgeon’s hand in deploying it to enhance her messaging. It is a foundational structural apparatus always at the heart of her métier. As her audience, we must always be cognizant of it, or we risk missing the emotional and corporeal depth that her work imparts.
“There's a purposeful tension between the extent to which I acknowledge the original imagery and how much is pure intuition; it is in that moment of fusion that my art is made—when traditional observation and innate response bring together seemingly unrelated images, transforming them into open-ended possibilities.”
There is a further axis to Smirnoff’s painterly psychology that is exquisitely understated yet intrinsic—the relationship between botanical, earthly and meteorological symbolism, and feminine power. In her waggish blooms and domestic mise-en-scènes, there is an inkling of Scottish painter and printmaker, Elizabeth Blackadder’s (1931-2021), lifelong studies of the natural world; Smirnoff’s sepulchral and phantasmagorical themes recall Gertrude Abercrombie’s (1909-1977), solemn nightly realms; and there are filaments of connection between Smirnoff’s radiant atmospheres and the dreamscapes of Mary DeVincentis, Katherine Bradford, and Macena Barton (1901-1986). Parallels between burgeoning womanhood reflected in Mother Earth run like unseen ribbons of steel through every aspect of Smirnoff’s work. Alenushka and Leviathan (2021), underscores this point superlatively. In the foreground, a lone female wears a blood-crimson smock as she kneels, head bowed and covered by a blue mantle. She is sitting on an emerald-green plane adorned with brilliant, blue petal-like flecks. The field is so malleable to the eye, so uncanny, that it could be sky, soil, or ocean (although the title suggests the latter). This detail is a marvelous example of how sophisticated Smirnoff is at creating room for the viewer’s interpretation; it is an invitation to enter her worlds. At each side are soaring mountains and beyond is a roiling, tempestuous sky. Our heroine has been approached by an inquisitive, delicate white creature—a dog perhaps—but with a heavenly countenance, which cranes its neck as if to divine what she hides beneath her robe. The simplicity and serenity of the image—the woman’s dolorous posture, the animal’s concerned advance, and their quiet togetherness beneath the wild squall, are heartbreakingly tender juxtapositions. Ultimately, the red-clothed Alenushka, is mirrored in the ruby, setting Sun—woman as the giver of all life.
But there is one artist in particular who we can look to for several affinities that elucidate Smirnoff’s aspirations—the Russian-French artist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985). His rich and wildly celebratory palette was an expression of his love for color, about which he was equally exuberant:
“Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.”
And:
“All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”
But that is not the only quality he shares with Smirnoff. While much of Chagall’s subjects originated from memories of his beloved childhood city of Vitebsk, he went on to live in France, where he became entranced by the Parisian scene. In 1941, he moved to the United States to escape the harshening regime of the Vichy government, returning to France permanently in 1947. Chagall was also influenced by the light, hues and landscapes that he saw on travels abroad to such places as Italy, Palestine and Egypt. His visual library, like Smirnoff’s, was expansive and ran the gamut from mythic to pedestrian. Indeed, we can discern crossovers in their pictorial penchants—orthodox iconography, shimmering wraiths, verdant florals, winged or weightless figures and domestic objects floating in the air, folk art, menageries, dancing acrobats, and ghostly characters riding through celestial planes on airborne horses.
Chagall’s tableaux coalesced Fauvist, Symbolist and Cubist inclinations forming a uniquely vibrant, whimsical style. With such variety, he avoided being pinned within the confines of any singular artistic movement—although he was certainly a progenitor of Surrealism. Smirnoff’s vocabulary is as wide-ranging, her palette as vivid, and the continual adaptation and re-contextualizing of her content so unanticipated, that she too sidesteps easy categorization. This zeal for an almost matrix-like industry of constant evolution and discovery is, for Smirnoff, once more located in cerebrally liminal zones:
“It’s important to retain wonder and reason, and to explore the connections (or confines) between them as a way to test the limits of conception. If we develop new ways of looking and perceiving, we might discover that the boundary between reality and imagination is far more porous than we may have thought.”
Smirnoff has the rare ability to absorb great quantities of visual information and distill them into a cohesive ideological framework that is essentially about humanness, in all of its complicated guises and oppositions—strength and fragility; intellectual and instinctual; unity and enmity. By alchemically altering aesthetic and sociological status-quos, she forges surprising new associations that bridge historic narratives and contemporary concerns, both global and individual. Her work confounds our expectations by shifting perspectives of self in relation to spatial parameters; by torquing wakefulness and reason with dream-states and subconscious flow; by permitting both doubt and certainty; and by melting divisions between psychological and geographical temporalities.
Only a mind pledged to curiosity; a vision bound to reinvention; and a creative vigor that thrives on personal and cultural archeology, could traverse such artistic terrain and conjure these captivating inner worlds and outer horizons. If Smirnoff’s beguiling panoramas leaves us wondering, questioning and re-evaluating our relationships with time, existence and knowledge, then that is as it should be. She delivers us to the brink of the known, and she equips us to venture into whatever lies beyond.
