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Lot Essay
Painted in 2017, and held in the same collection since that year, Paint While Screaming is a witty self-portrait that captures Emily Mae Smith’s wry visual imagination. Against a backdrop of pink and blue-tinged clouds, a faceless cartoon-like figure turns towards the viewer, its mouth open in a scream and a paintbrush clasped in its hand. The stick-like character is Smith’s personal avatar, adapted from the anthropomorphised broom in ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ sequence in Disney’s Fantasia (1940). The motif is deliberately ambiguous, invoking a painter’s brush, a domestic broom—once a symbol of female labour—and a host of phallic connotations. Throughout Smith’s oeuvre, the figure moves through various art-historical settings: here, the floating clouds and painting-within-a-painting invite particular comparison with the work of René Magritte, while the screaming mouth conjures the existential visions of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso. With its central figure cast as a painter, the present work offers a humorous pun on ideas about creation and authenticity; indeed, Smith produced a similar drawing in an article for GQ Style in 2019 when prompted to sketch a picture of herself in under five minutes.
Born in Austin, and now based in Brooklyn, Smith has risen to prominence over the past decade. In 2018, the year after the present work, she mounted her first solo museum exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon, followed by solo shows at institutions including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, in 2019 and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, in 2020. Smith’s work is rooted in considered art-historical study: her characters inhabit detailed scenes inspired by Surrealism, Symbolism, Romanticism, Pop Art and other movements. ‘When I was about 17, I saw Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago’, she recalls. ‘… At that moment I fell in love with painting down to the material level … I saw that it was conceptual, experiential, and that depth of meaning worked far beyond a picture’ (E. Smith, quoted in N. Johnson, ‘Get to Know Emily Mae Smith’s Surreal, Sensual Painting’, GQ Style, 17 January 2019). Through her broom-like alter-ego, Smith wanders the halls of history, simultaneously emulating the artists she reveres and subverting them through sly feminist caricature. In the present work, the angst-ridden painter is recast as a witty innuendo, taking to task the phallocentric myth of artistic genius.
Born in Austin, and now based in Brooklyn, Smith has risen to prominence over the past decade. In 2018, the year after the present work, she mounted her first solo museum exhibition at Le Consortium in Dijon, followed by solo shows at institutions including the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, in 2019 and the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, in 2020. Smith’s work is rooted in considered art-historical study: her characters inhabit detailed scenes inspired by Surrealism, Symbolism, Romanticism, Pop Art and other movements. ‘When I was about 17, I saw Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte at the Art Institute of Chicago’, she recalls. ‘… At that moment I fell in love with painting down to the material level … I saw that it was conceptual, experiential, and that depth of meaning worked far beyond a picture’ (E. Smith, quoted in N. Johnson, ‘Get to Know Emily Mae Smith’s Surreal, Sensual Painting’, GQ Style, 17 January 2019). Through her broom-like alter-ego, Smith wanders the halls of history, simultaneously emulating the artists she reveres and subverting them through sly feminist caricature. In the present work, the angst-ridden painter is recast as a witty innuendo, taking to task the phallocentric myth of artistic genius.