Sam Kasirer-Smibert
5th year Painting and Drawing

Composition 465
30″ x 40″
oil paint on canvas
2017

Sand Banks
30″ x 40″
oil paint on canvas
2017

Untitled 485
30″ x 40″
oil paint on canvas
2016

I never learned to crawl as a child but, at some point, just stood up and walked. This is not to boast, for the developmental skip resulted in a significant left-brain/right-brain disjuncture. It is a gap I now bridge through painting.

With or without this dysfunction, I might have become a painter anyway. But of one thing I’m certain: my “disability” has had a pronounced influence on how I engage with the world through art. To meet my experience of dislocation, I’ve felt compelled to throw my whole body into the act of painting. I’ve learned to paint, for example, with both hands; but this not about action painting or Rorschach symmetry.

These paintings map the trajectories of energy and communication involved in both a medical condition and my responses to it. My approach is raw and intuitive—and painterly in the sense that I am able to let paint be paint. It can drip and flow and catch the eye, for it has own pathways, too. Bright drips spanning dark, cavernous hollows are just that; but they also form a map, or index, of the play of neurons in the cerebellum of a differently-abled person.

My work addresses issues of discomfort, fragmenting visual space in ways that reflect my perception of reality and communicate my private experience. For me, every approach to the canvas is an effort to place my vision of the world before the eyes of an embodied spectator.
I will sometimes employ, for example, bright colours and a light glaze to generate a vibratory effect or visual disturbance that enables viewers to experience, firsthand, my own sense of dislocation and confusion.

Colour is also used in ways that draw some spaces forward and push others back. The surface, I then notice, seems to be breathing slowly, as if in counterpoint to the effort and strain I am feeling—arms outstretched—in my attempt to map the surface with my body.