DARKNESS AND LIGHT

For nearly 20 years, Joalida Smit, a native of Cape Town, South Africa, lived and worked as a neuropsychologist for the NHS in central London. When she returned to Cape Town, her husband accepted a transfer to the Chicago area, and just before the pandemic her and her children joined her husband and the family settled in Lake Forest.

There were a number of challenges moving to a new country, some of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. Smit could not continue her work as neuropsychologist in the United States because it would’ve required obtaining a new set of qualifications based on different standards. To combat the isolation of the lockdown, she began to paint.

Her debut show, “In Full Bloom: A Meditation on Paradox” is currently running through mid-July at The Gallery in Lake Forest.

“The show’s been going very well. it’s been very well received, and I’ve had some sales. They are really large works, so I’m surprised,” Smit says. “People are putting my art on their walls and I’m truly honored. It’s been a wonderful reception. The community has been very appreciative and engaging.”

Smit says she hasn’t done much painting since the show opened because painting the flowers took a lot of her mental space. However, with the return of summer she hopes to get back in the studio and revisit some earlier works she produced during the lockdown and show them this summer at art shows sponsored by the Deer Path Art League and Artists on the Bluff. She sits on the board of directors of both, and they’ve been instrumental in helping to launch her career as an artist.

Another large show of works will be on the agenda for 2024 or 2025, inspired the forest, and she also wants to take her career as a neuropsychologist into deeper consideration.

“I want to link my art with my neuroscience background, the environment, and the mental health benefits. Specifically, the role of forests on mental health,” she explains. “That’s something I want to explore a little bit more, to bring my neuropsychology training in with the work that I’m doing.”

Smit is also still pondering the floral works she produced for the “In Full Bloom” show and some of their deeper meanings. To listen to her speak about them is hearing her neuroscience brain at work. She gave a talk for a garden society recently and said a lot of people are curious about why she chose flowers.

“I think the theme of these single large flowers came from when I started painting and I wanted to do something that brought me joy,” she says. “I had to go through a process of going to find what brings me joy. What are the things in life that make me feel really happy?”

Smit’s mother was a fashion designer and designed wedding dresses, often with large scale flower prints on the back. She says it’s not just about the flower, but how the viewer experiences it.

“It’s more about the way the flower presented itself in a kind of a vulnerability, like an openness, which is where the idea of paradox came from,” she says. “That it was strong and vulnerable at exactly the same time.”

Because of her Dutch heritage, Smit says she’s always been in love with Rembrandt and Vermeer and the Dutch artists that still live on. She tried to apply similar themes to the large flower, almost like the Georgia O’Keefe-style flower.

“Then it almost became a bit of a psychological theme around light and dark in terms of how you balance your inner energy, your darker energies with the lighter side of the self,” Smit says. “So, the paintings have this progression where I try to push it to its limits.”

One of her paintings, titled “Falling Upward,” was inspired by the writings of Father Richard Rohr, the well-known Franciscan priest who writes about spirituality. Rohr believes we all have a second half of life where we can let go of certain aspects of ourselves and live more freely.

“That’s what I tried to do with these artworks was to free them up completely,” she says. “So, here is the technique that was the base where I started out and then I wanted to free myself completely from this technique—still maintaining something of the original foundation.”

She says each painting’s name signifies a part of this journey both in terms of developing her technique, but also a kind of spiritual practice at the same time in terms of who we want to be in the second half of life, in a new country, in a new profession. Her current show at The Gallery is a representation of that process.

“I feel it is quite telling on a psychological level in the second half of life that you can’t undo what has happened,” Smit says. “You have to live with it, you have to accept it, but also let it go at the same time.”

“In Full Bloom: A Meditation of Paradox” runs through mid-July at The Gallery in Lake Forest. The paintings will be available for viewing on the wall of the Gorton Center, where Smit has a studio, after the show closes.