Helen Smith

In 1995, I founded Waygood as a program of critical contemporary art presented in the context of an artists’ venue. For me this is defined as a studio, a gallery, and a meeting place for artists, art teachers, and writers. I am interested in the way artists develop ideas within a community, with which they share interests, art, and a lifestyle, a community that knows the artists well enough to understand their research and production. Out of this position in the landscape of contemporary visual arts grows a philosophy for Waygood’s program, and a direction for my personal research and arts practice. The former is public; the latter is private.

Helen Smith

In 1995, I founded Waygood as a program of critical contemporary art presented in the context of an artists’ venue. For me this is defined as a studio, a gallery, and a meeting place for artists, art teachers, and writers. I am interested in the way artists develop ideas within a community, with which they share interests, art, and a lifestyle, a community that knows the artists well enough to understand their research and production.

Out of this position in the landscape of contemporary visual arts grows a philosophy for Waygood’s program, and a direction for my personal research and arts practice. The former is public; the latter is private.

Jesus loves Helen Smith I and II are rendered in watercolor and gouache. I try and engage with my own subjective responses to the world at a very primitive level. I want my imagery to have a communal language drawn from the Jungian and the sensational. The self-portraits are not portraits of an individual as such, but of a life continued from the ancients and the ancestral.