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						April 20, 1977

City of Palo Alto
Arts Department


		For Immediate Release

	A one-person exhibit of paintings and etchings by Edith Smith will
be shown at the Palo Alto City Hall, 250 Hamilton Ave., May 9 through
June 15.

	Featured in the Civic Center lobby will be large shaped paintings,
constructed of jig sawed plywood and executed in acrylic and lacquer
paints. Themes developed in the cut-outs are echoed in the watercolors
and etchings hung in the corridors.

	A major theme in the show is the history of Venus as the prototype
symbol of love, fertility, beauty, and self awareness. In the artist's
earliest "Venus" series, a group of etchings done in Paris in 1972, a
wall-mural format is utilized to show the female form as depicted by
Velasquez, Botticelli, Cranach, Ingres, Picasso, and deKooning. A brief
hand-set poem dwells on the women thus depicted, while two more aware
figures shown outside the "mural" format express Mrs. Smith's concept of
women gesturing toward the future. The above works, as well as a preliminary
version in watercolor, build up to the large scale cut-out painting entitled
"Venus Contained". Designed in one-point perspective as an extended
horizontal-diagonal-prone cruciform, the work is both painting and sculpture.
Translusent cubes in vivid analogous hues contain isolated females as
envisioned by artists throughout history, or pre-history, as in the case of
the Venus of Willendorf.

	Through the shaped painting concept, the artist probes the technical
possibilities of creating an illusion of spacial reality. Outer edges are
cut to further the spatial elements of the "interior" of the painting.
The shapes and scale of the works, as well as the implied exterior shapes,
give the viewer a sense of almost touchable actuality, exciting unexplored
areas of sensation.

	Other themes developed in the two mediums are groups of California
counter-culture figures in natural California landscape settings and within
contempary architecture: "Harbingers"; "Califorina Wedding Muralization";
and "Avanti".

	Several of the intaglio prints are coumputer-generated. The artist
states: "I prepared conte crayon and wash drawings to be photographed by
a T.V. camera directed by the computer. The images were processed by an
edge program which picked up varying degrees of contrast. Distortion
programs were introduced to give novel twisted, fanned, and inverted images
which were then shot onto photo-sensitve zinc intaglio plates."
In "L'Isolement",a computer-generated plate is printed in registration
with a hand-worked etching plate containing colorful monoprint elements.

	Edith Smith received her B.A. and M.A. in Art from the University
of California at Berkeley. She did further studies in etching and lithography
at the San Francisico Art Institute and studied all gravure techniques at
the Atelier Caleveart-Brun in Paris. Her solo exhibits include the Oakland
Art Museum, Gumps Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Art, the Artists' Gallery,
New Yory City, and Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris. She has appeared in group
shows at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. At present
Mrs. Smith teaches printmaking and drawing at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills.