larice Smith is an intriguing and enigmatic artist. Belonging at once to no school yet clearly influenced by several traditions, she creates a world through paint that is at the same time tangible and distant; familiar yet disquieting; communal but highly personal. Always in admiration of painters such as Ingres, Manet and Sargent she focused her studies on traditional painting, training through life drawing and working in oils.

Her Paintings are a celebration of brushstroke and the expressionistic quality of color. Both in technique and mood, her paintings share little with the strict photo-realists who are her contemporaries but are rather linked to earlier painters who are her inspiration. Yet to see Clarice as a derivation of these artists is to misunderstand her. She is an artist who responds clearly and absolutely to her own surroundings, giving expression to them on canvas via texture and color. Her ability to communicate to the viewer in a visual language that is so clearly understood yet so highly personal is a wonder. That she does this in such a tantalizing manner which so thoroughly delights the eye is her great achievement.