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About
My name is Rebecca Smith but most people call me Becky. I paint still lifes and write historical novels in the juniper hills outside of Santa Fe, NM. My winding path has carried me from touring with my garage band The Cynics in the late 1980s to earning an MFA in painting from Yale, founding the influential Bellwether Gallery in New York, and eventually returning to my own painting after decades inside the contemporary art world. My first novel, Follow the Ecstasy, is finished and finding its place in the world.
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Ravens, hollyhocks, flat-bottomed clouds, the moon. These small paintings are intimate observations of life in the juniper; larger works bring together the natural and human-made set in the silent landscape of New Mexico. Ikebana, found objects, stillness.
My first novel, Follow the Ecstasy, reimagines the life of Thomas Merton through his relationship with Margie Smith, the young nurse he fell in love with near the end of his life. It’s a novel about love, faith and the sometimes impossible distance between the life we believe in and the life we live.
I read tarot and make ritual candles because I believe ritual helps us give form to what we already know, hope for, mourn, or want to change. Tarot creates a space for intuition and reflection; candles turn intention into something physical: light it, tend it, let it burn. Magic, to me, is another form of paying attention.