The Cheshire Union is pleased to welcome a brand new artist to The Rusty Brundage Memorial Art Gallery: Mike Smith! Michael T. Smith is an artist based in the Finger Lakes region of New York. A self-taught painter, he draws from his background in construction to explore the depth of the landscape. His layered acrylic works often begin as field sketches and unfold through a process of building, scraping, and revealing. The resulting images are shaped as much by memory and mystery as by the land itself. Expressive and abstracted, Smith’s work is deeply rooted in the land that raised him.
Valleyscapes will be on display from August 3rd through September 14th. Please join us for an opening reception and meet-the-artist on Sunday, August 3rd from 2-4pm.
Here is what Smith has to say about his work:
"To live in a place long enough is to know its spirit. The paintings in Valleyscapes explore the hills of the Finger Lakes as more than just a landscape—they are resting places, thresholds, and beginnings. Valleys have long been seen as places of return and renewal, and this body of work examines that quiet but powerful pull.
Each painting is made through a process of layering and excavation. Working in acrylics, oil pastels, and collage on wood panel, building up and scraping back day after day, allowing the image to emerge slowly through time. The result is not something planned, but something discovered. Often what appears feels like a memory or a revelation—familiar yet unexpected. These are not renderings of a specific place, but rather echoes of many places, shaped by years of walking, working, and sketching in the land.
There is a mystery in each painting—a sense that something sacred, even ancient, still lingers in the soil. The Seneca Nation, whose ancestral stories are rooted in these hills, speaks of a spiritual birthplace here. The works in Valleyscapes are part of a longer conversation—between the visible and invisible, the known and the half-remembered.
This collection is about return and renewal in the land—what it means to live within it, to listen to it, and to be quietly shaped by its rhythms, seasons, and silence."
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