Meet Bakehouse artist Carmen Smith, a painter whose practice explores how the built environment affects emotional and psychological states. Night Swimming, her current series, evokes a magical, otherworldly playground of glowing pools and colorful buildings. While her compositions are kept simple, her exaggerated use of color elicits an impactful response.

Carmen makes her paintings from memory, drawing on familiar landscapes and architecture. She pieces together common features of South Florida’s tropical and urban environment, including modern building facades, pools, balconies, windows, breeze-blocks, pool slides, and diving boards. In referencing these aesthetically-iconic settings, she invites viewers to explore experiences of nostalgia, while her use of perspective positions them as part of the scene.

With her exaggeratedly bright, high-contrast color palette, Carmen dually explores color as a form of leisure, culminating in a more nuanced consideration of how place affects experience, memory, and identity.

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Can you tell us about your artistic practice?

I am a painter and the concept I explore is place. I've recently (within the last few years) focused on creating imaginary spaces with pools. Night Swimming, my current series, is much more liminal or fantastical than any of my previous work, which was more architectural. I'm making the current paintings more playful and imaginative, but keeping the compositions simple. They're designed from memories and familiar structures, but then painted with an exaggeratedly bright, high-contrast color palette. So I'm exploring these made up places, as well as color as a form of leisure.

Tell us about a personal artistic project or body of work that you are currently excited about.

I'm still excited about my series Night Swimming, because at first the paintings were almost realistic-looking spaces. The colors were not very realisitc, but the settings were. Currently, I'm figuring out how to make the settings less realistic and more abstract or dream-like. I've actually been having vivid dreams lately that mirror some of my sketches; they're vibrantly-colored, open landscapes with pools and paths in unrealistic colors. In my dreams, I keep trying to take photos, but the phone doesn't work...so when I wake up, I try to recall what I saw in my imagination and tell someone or sketch it to remember it.

Tell us about how you have developed as an artist since you began working at Bakehouse.

Since I joined Bakehouse, I have felt more confident to take risks in my practice. I have about six different projects I'm working on concurrently, including some large scale drawings that incorporate monoprinting and other media. Before I joined Bakehouse, I was more strict or regimented with my art, making it all very similar and streamlined. Now, I see my work as more of a practice. I'm not afraid to try a new idea that's burning in my mind, and it's helpful to have feedback from a community of artists.