Angela Gaffney-Smith received her B.A. in Visual Arts/Art History from the State University at New Paltz. Gaffney-Smith, born in England, has her studio in Saugerties, NY at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. She has been painting in watercolor for over 35 years beginning at the Woodstock School of Art, Woodstock, NY. She uses two distinct mediums to convey her spiritual connection to nature and light. Each represents a contrasting side of her visions.
Gaffney-Smith’s watercolors are spontaneous and expressive with a joyful use of color, real and imagined. They suggest the “aura” of the subjects she paints whether flora or fauna, human or mineral. She lets colors gently flow and interact to create a gem-like transparency.
Inspired by her Irish heritage and the Native American stone piles in the Catskills, Angela constructs bluestone cairn sculptures ranging from 2 inches to 7 feet tall. These cairns are vessels for thoughts and images and often contain meaningful relics of people and places. They begin with an infinite circle as a foundation and wind towards a point of air and light. Gaffney-Smith’s sculpture is a homage to the perpetual quality of stone amid nature’s accelerating transience.
Gaffney-Smith’s work is in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Ireland. She has been in international and regional juried shows including the Bristol Museum of Art, The Masur Museum, The Schweinfurth Center, The Rhode Island Watercolor Society, The Mighty Tieton Warehouse, The Adirondack Guild Gallery, and the Woodstock Artist Association and Museum, NY.
