Name: Anj Smith: In the Studio
Uploaded: 2026-01-19T04:32:54.000Z
Duration: 3 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I always worry the studio is going to burn down, so I leave all my flammable things in the sink overnight.

I think that's quite a good idea in case.

The second conditional

If there was a fire, then it would just go out in the sink.

I'm Ange Smith and we are in my London studio.

I've always painted, even as a very young child, and

I think it was my way of processing the world.

I've worked largely with representational imagery.

Genre is very slippery and, you know, time, perspective, and

so the work can become a kind of visual insurgency.

It can reflect a historical context, but at the same time new meanings can be forged.

The actual process of painting is akin to a kind of waiting, attempting to access a kind of psychological spaciousness where unexpected things can creep into the process.

My foray into the female nude started when I was commissioned to paint a ceiling and it was a physically incredibly demanding process.

I was using my own body as reference material and it was interesting to think about the post pregnant body, places of nurture and tenderness, being an engine for creativity equally and just as powerfully as the perhaps more macho standard.

But I realised that what I really wanted to add was an oscillating sense of self and something that is not singular and easy to define.

There's a particular painting, but tell it slant, where the figure is just standing in water.

something that's also very malleable and something that constantly changes shape, felt like a very apt contextualization for the figure.

I think it holds connotations of rising sea levels and ecological disaster.

And I was thinking about how our environment globally is shifting and morphing.

Attitudes towards the figure and conversations around gender are also similarly on the move.

I started to think about a philosophical impulse of atopia, which is the idea of wandering off from a point in order to re evaluate a lot of conventional conclusions and definitions and classifications.

Roland Barthes described this atopia as drifting habitations.

All of these things were at play and could be activated by that title.

This is 20 years worth of my brushes, these little watercolor ones.

At this point in my studio practice, I feel as though I have only just scratched the surface of what painting could be.

It cultivates a sense of criticality and I think when we are in this age of disinformation, that's one of the few remaining tools that we have to sharpen our sense of psychological openness as an act of rejecting the old codes, Sam.