Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing
Website: renesmith.net
René Smith is a painter and pastel artist based in Oakland, California, who works out of a studio in Berkeley. She holds an M.F.A. in Painting from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and a B.A. in Painting from Bennington College in Vermont.
Smith has taught painting and drawing at a range of institutions, including portfolio-preparation courses for high school students at Tyler School of Art and Moore College of Art, and undergraduate through M.F.A.-level painting courses at St. Thomas Aquinas College in New York, Temple University’s Rome campus in Italy, and Chiang Mai University in Thailand. She lives in Oakland and works in Berkeley, where she founded and runs Berkeley Painting Club, a studio in Strawberry Creek Park offering drawing, painting, animation, and comics classes to students from grade 5 through adulthood.
Smith’s work spans oil painting and soft pastel drawing, built from her own photographs — phone pictures of daily life, vacations, neighborhood walks, and family moments. Of her pastel work she has said her approach is “tactile and direct — no brush, no medium, just the hand and a stick of pigment,” building up multiple layers of pigment on textured paper to let earlier layers show through. Recurring subjects include oversaturated light, wood grain, hair, sand, and cacti, chosen in part for how they let her leave an image “unclear or partly figured.” Across both mediums, her work returns to the relationship between photography, memory, and the passage of time, and to painting’s handmade, slow-to-make and slow-to-view quality as a counterpoint to the pace of everyday image consumption.
Smith’s paintings were featured in New American Paintings Issue 68 (February 2007), juried by Darsie Alexander. She presented a solo exhibition of her pastel drawings, Pacific Daylight Time, at Et al. / Et al. etc. in San Francisco (June–July 2025). Her work has also appeared in solo and group shows in New York, Italy, and Thailand.
More information is available at renesmith.net.