About
Lindsay Smail creates distinctive abstracts grounded in the local landscape.
Trained as a graphic designer and creative director, she turned to painting to nurture her creativity (and get away from screens). Painting quickly took over.
Her unique approach to painting rests on a deep understanding of design and colour, freshly animated by the sensual immediacy of her materials.
Smail exhibits regularly in central Ontario and Toronto. Her paintings can be found in private collections in Canada and the US. She lives and works in the woods outside Washago, Ontario.
Artist Statement
As I swim or hike through local forests and waterways I notice the chaotic yet deeply organized beauty of nature and its principles of interdependence and constant change. Leaves, fractured rock, and ragged shorelines reveal recurring patterns and forms.
These experiences and observations are the foundation of my paintings. Rather than represent specific places, I focus on form, pattern, and colour, recombining these elements into abstract paintings that evoke landscape. Viewers often identify my paintings with a landscape they know, finding similarities to wildly divergent places I have never visited.
Edges fascinate me. Working with watercolour-like acrylic on clear-primed canvas I’m able to create edges that are complex and self-similar. Many of my forms are landscapes in and of themselves, echoing the fractal structures I observe in nature.
I draw on the colour and composition skills honed by my work as a graphic designer. I begin with naturalistic, translucent colour, then push into brightness and opacity to disrupt and surprise, like the sudden feeling of aliveness we sometimes experience in nature.
Artist CV
Recent / Upcoming Exhibitions
2026 Seen | Unseen, Quest Gallery, Midland
2026 Artist Project, Enercare Centre, Toronto
2025 Traditional Transformed Annual Landscape Exhibition, OMAH, Orillia
2025 Making Our Mark, MA&C on Main, Bracebridge, & Leslie Grove Gallery, Toronto
2025 Spring Members’ Show, MA&C on Main, Bracebridge
2025 Orillia Landscapes, Orillia Opera House, Orillia
2025 Winter’s Embrace, Muskoka Discovery Centre Gallery, Gravenhurst
2024 Square Foot Show, MA&C on Main, Bracebridge
2024 Images Thanksgiving Studio Tour, Oro-Medonte
2024 Headwaters Fall Festival Juried Art Show, Alton Mills Art Centre, Alton Mills
2024 ArtWalk in the Square, Toronto
2024 Muskoka in the County, Picton
2024 Rosedale Art Fair, Toronto
2024 Riverdale ArtWalk, Toronto
2024 Spring Members’ Show, Muskoka Arts & Crafts, Bracebridge
2024 Art Intelligence, Partial Gallery at Gallery 1313, Toronto
Galleries
Pivot Gallery, Rosseau, Ontario
Mountainside Gallery, Collingwood, Ontario
Awards & Grants
2026 Exhibition Assistance Grant, Ontario Arts Council
2025 Kevin J. Batchelor Emerging Artist Award at Tradition Transformed, OMAH, Orillia
2025 Exhibition Assistance Grant, Ontario Arts Council
2025 Best Use of Colour, Spring Members’ Show, Muskoka Arts & Crafts
Press
2026 New Midland exhibit explores landscapes, memory and reflection, Midland Today
2026 New exhibition coming to Quest Art, Midland Today
2026 Six Artists I’m Excited to Meet at Artist Project, Opaloma newsletter by Odessa Paloma
2026 Washago painter featured at Artist Project 2026, in both Barrie Today and Orilllia Matters
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It’s like a peek into my art journal. I share work in progress, insights into my creative life, and the beautiful area I live in.
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