Carrie Mae Smith, If for Once We Could do Nothing

“If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.”
- from “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda

Lowell Ryan Projects is pleased to present If for Once We Could Do Nothing, an online exhibition of paintings by Carrie Mae Smith. Taking its title and sensibility from Pablo Neruda’s poem “Keeping Quiet,” the exhibition considers what it means to be still in a time of noise—to listen, to look, and to remember the quiet labor of care.

In this body of work, Smith continues her engagement with still life painting as both a meditative and a subversive practice. Her compositions—tablecloths draped and folded, freshly picked peas in a basket, peaches glowing against a patterned cloth—speak softly but insistently. They are not nostalgic recreations of domesticity, but careful reanimations of the simplicity of nourishment and ritual. “Perhaps the earth can teach us,” Neruda writes, “as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive.” Smith’s paintings follow that instruction, seeking vitality in stillness and meaning in the everyday.

Many of her motifs emerge from materials steeped in memory. The tablecloths are borrowed from a friend’s collection, once belonging to her mother—intimate artifacts that hold the invisible record of gendered labor. Their floral prints ripple and distort across large canvases, their forms abstracting into fields of color and light. Through scale and attention, Smith restores significance to the overlooked. Her approach to still life aligns her with painters such as Jean Siméon Chardin, Giorgio Morandi, Janet Fish, and Lois Dodd, who each found quiet radicality in ordinary subjects. Yet Smith’s focus on cultivation and care places her within contemporary dialogues on sustainability, feminism, and the ethics of attention. Her paintings suggest that to look closely—to truly see—is itself a political act.

Smith reflects: “I’ve been thinking about time and beauty. How, a century ago, lives were shorter but perhaps more connected to land, to craft. Singer sewing machines adorned with floral inlays, mason jars of preserved tomatoes—a kind of beauty born not of abundance, but of care.” In her twenties, Smith left college to work on organic farms across southern Europe, including Spain, Italy, and France, as well as in Martha’s Vineyard, MA, inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing’s The Good Life. That period of physical labor and cultivation continues to shape her worldview. In the studio, she brings the same patience and attention that once guided her in the field: planting, tending, waiting. Amid technological acceleration and climate anxiety, painting what she has grown or gathered becomes, in her words, “a radical offering of presence.”

The paintings in If for Once We Could Do Nothing provide a moment of suspension. Without prescribed solutions or answers, they capture a feeling of stillness and for noticing the delicate pulse of life that persists beneath the surface of the digital era. In Smith’s hands, painting becomes a form of listening: to the earth, to memory, and to the quiet wisdom of the past. Beauty here does not clamor for attention. It resides, gently, in the act of paying attention itself.

Inquire: HERE