Name: Anj Smith: Set in Amber
Uploaded: 2026-02-02T07:39:42.000Z
Duration: 4 min 49 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...

Basic passive voice

We are so increasingly conditioned to consume imagery, deluged by data points, constantly refreshing feeds.

And that is how I think most of us receive information.

If a viewer is prepared to look at a work and spend time and engage, I think different paintings then emerge from that.

There is something really unique and special about Florence as a city, and

then specifically about the paintings and the treasures that are here.

And then by extension of that, who do we prize and treasure and ascribe importance and significance to?

I am interested in the place where language runs out.

We are hampered in our understanding of realities by the strictures which we have imposed upon ourselves.

And I think perhaps part of the employment of the extremities of painting.

It's almost like an exploration of the edges of representation.

Usually with a painting of mine, you will find lots of different types of painting.

So there might be sort of anxiety driven geometry or very fine minutiae painted with a single squirrel hair brush or impasto that hangs down proud from the frame.

For me, aspiring to some kind of technological virtuosity is not my primary aim.

I think one of the glories of the medium is that nothing needs to be reduced down to the literal.

Some of the paintings that we are surrounded by in this museum, they function on an allegorical level, or there is a literal meaning.

There is old painting languages that were to do with codes and symbolism, but

all of these languages exist on top of each other.

In the painting False Steward, I was hugely inspired by the character of Ophelia in Hamlet.

There's a sort of rupture with how you are expecting the character to speak.

She cuts and splices different genres of language.

So she might break out into a song and then there might be a proverb in there.

From left to right, you can enter at any point.

There's the trajectory of what looks to be a Turneresque rainbow.

But actually on closer inspection, it is a distress flare.

There are spent canisters scattered on the frozen petrified ice scape.

When I started painting, people would ask me, is your work made in response to the environmental crisis that we're facing?

It's very important as a contemporary artist to be of your time.

And sometimes I think of these works a little bit like an insect trapped in amber.

They're made at a specific moment in time and they're reflective of that.

But at the same time, I really hope that they open out into asking much wider philosophical questions.

I am a huge fan of literature and epic literature, and

one of the books that's very close to my heart, which I think is a literary masterpiece, is Boccaccio's Decamera.

The very opening framed story of the book is set in Santa Maria Novella.

Boccaccio is talking about the importance of looking to our past in order to think about our present moment and navigate the future.

And that really speaks to me about the various incarnations that Florence has been, and

also an inspiration to what painting can be now in contemporary culture.