Smita Rao exhibits her computer-altered Bucks County landscapes at the new The Gallery at The Frame Shop in Lambertville.
By: Megan Sullivan
Beneath many layers, artist Smita Rao’s thoughts are neatly tucked within her digital prints of Bucks County landscapes. The Doylestown resident transfers her visions into unique forms of art and makes them tangible.
Ms. Rao builds images from her own drawings, photographs and water colors, and then manipulates them using a computer. Something as simple as a winter’s day is reinvented, recreated the way she perceived that moment. A selection of Ms. Rao’s landscape prints will be on display at The Gallery at The Frame Shop in Lambertville, N.J., through Nov. 30.
Born in India, where she received a fine arts education, Ms. Rao moved to the United States in the 1980s and decided to continue her art education at Bucks County Community College in 1999. Under the instruction of Craig Alan Johnson, she learned digital illustration and discovered an art form without boundaries.
"When I first saw the program, my feeling was, ‘Wow, this is enormous,’" she says. "It’s like standing in this huge warehouse, and for an artist, you’re given paint, watercolors, just about everything, and yes you can have everything but yet you have to compile it into something which will translate your thoughts."
Ms. Rao’s creative application of the digital tools available intrigued Mr. Johnson, who offered to do an independent study with her to use the technology to bring landscapes into the current times. Mainly using Adobe Photoshop, she experimented and explored to see what limits she could take it to. Her artwork proves that the sky is the limit.
As she looks at one of her works being featured in the exhibit, "Window II," Ms. Rao tries to explain how her visions come to life. "Window II" began more than three years ago, when Ms. Rao painted a watercolor of a winter scene she saw through her window. A year later she photographed a similar winter scene from that same window. "The sky was the same and I thought I knew that it matched," Ms. Rao says. She had also drawn the same picture with pencil. Through the layering of her own art, she digitally created the piece to depict how she interpreted the hills, trees and sky in her mind. "Combined, they are the complete picture that I was first seeing," she says.
Not only did she bring to life what she saw through that window, but she opened windows for others. Ms. Rao recalls how she didn’t fully understand the point of displaying her art when first asked to show in a gallery. "Everything is complete when I complete a picture," she says. "It’s over and done with. But a couple times people came up to me and expressed what they felt, their feelings toward it.
"Sometimes they were really insightful and I realized, ‘Oh my goodness, this is nothing to do with me. It’s something to do with them,’" she continues. "It was their vision, it was a window into them. For me it was over, but it began with somebody else. To me, that is just stunning."
The exhibit at The Gallery at The Frame Shop will feature about a dozen of Ms. Rao’s landscapes, which are printed through a complex gicleé process. Master printers spray millions of droplets of ink onto paper or canvas through multiple nozzles to achieve precise levels of color, value, texture and transparency through this technique.
The cozy gallery opened in September and Ms. Rao’s works are part of its third exhibit, which also features paintings of Monhegan Island, Maine, by five artists exhibiting together as the Monhegan Group. Curator Lise desChamps, director of Art Affiliates, a privately owned company specializing in artist representation, says she decided to open the gallery after working a corporate job for 24 years. In addition to monthly exhibits, the gallery holds a collection of contemporary and vintage wood, stone and metal sculpture, fountains and decorative items. The gallery shares its space on South Main Street with The Frame Shop, custom fine art framers.
Since Ms. Rao first started her art form, she has won a number of scholarships and has exhibited at the Woodmere Art Museum (Philadelphia), Berman Museum of Art (Ursinus College in Collegeville), Perkins Center for the Arts (Moorestown, N.J.), Abington Art Center (Jenkintown) and several galleries. Her art has also been recognized with a grant awarded by the Leeway Foundation, which supports individual women artists, art programs and arts organizations in the greater Philadelphia area.
"What excites me is that as tools have evolved from simple clay and crude marks to the fluidity of oil paint and the magic of photography, there have always been early exciting efforts, new ways of seeing," Ms. Rao says in her artist’s statement. "Through history, it is the early adopters, those who are not trapped in old formats just because they feel comfortable, whose work becomes recognized for just that vision."
Smita Rao’s landscapes will be on display at The Gallery at The Frame Shop, 39 N. Main St., Lambertville, N.J., through Nov. 30. An artist’s reception will be held Nov. 13,1-5 p.m. Gallery hours: Daily 11 a.m.-6 p.m. For information, call (609) 397-8939. The Gallery at The Frame Shop on the Web: www.thegallerynj.com

