Up close and personal with the evocative, vibrant work of artist Liz Rundorff Smith
Like a colorful layer cake, Liz Rundorff Smith’s work is cheery, bright, and beautiful on the surface. Once you dig a little deeper, however, you taste richer, even darker themes—the many layers inside meaningful, nourishing pieces of art that her collectors can’t help but return to for seconds and thirds.
“When you commit to a practice as an artist, you’re always asking, ‘why am I making this?’ For me, I’ve been interested for a long time in the idea of creating a memorial and viewing the painting as an object in and of itself,” reflects Rundorff Smith, who primarily focuses on large-scale paintings, encaustic pieces, and works on paper. “How I approach my work is similar to how we interact with something that acts as a memorial: commemorating my life in a way that is connected to the universal experience of love and loss.”
Nostalgic, kitschy colors. Patterns that evoke hazy, fractured memories. A lingering familiarity that surrounds abstract forms. We all see and feel something different yet undefinable in Rundorff Smith’s work, and that’s precisely the point. “I love taking something that’s very mundane—like the scenery of your everyday life—and focusing on it to the point that you’re making it mean something to you in a way that still feels accessible. For instance, I often use the very crisp green of my yard. I’ll use a lot of shapes that are taken from my home, like the inflatable pool in our yard. In a way, [those forms become] my shrine: something beautiful and monumental, a reflection of my space in the world that I make meaningful.”
Originally from Western Pennsylvania, where she earned an MFA in painting at Edinburgh University, Rundorff Smith first landed in Greenville as an arts manager for the Artisphere festival. She then went on to build out her practice at the Greenville Center for Creative Arts (GCCA) before forging illuminating relationships with new collectors and the Upstate arts community as assistant gallery director at Art & Light Gallery, where she is also a represented artist.
“Art & Light has been an important part of my growth in recent years as an artist . . . working with a gallery has definitely helped with defining the work I feel most confident about and want to pursue consistently,” adds Rundorff Smith, who has since completed multiple large-scale commissions for homeowners and hospitality clients like The AC Hotel. It is her textural, smaller encaustic pieces, however, that tend to fly off the walls.
“Encaustic is a very different medium. It’s more expensive to use and it presents some different challenges, but I love it. In some of [my previous work], I’d embed fake flowers like you’d see on roadside memorials, and make them very sculptural. Now, I’m using pastel powders and opaque mediums to create depths of details. The more minimal and open-ended, the more people seem to respond to the work. There’s so much that you can do with the medium—I discover something new every time I use it.”
See more of Liz Rundorff Smith’s art at lizrundorffsmith.com.
