MEMBER FEATURE:

Our monthly Member Feature aims to showcase the talent that occupies our buildings and celebrate their work.

This month, we had the pleasure of interviewing Rockella Space Member Roxa Smith. Based at Brown Bears Studios, Roxa is a Brooklyn-based artist whose vibrant paintings transform domestic interiors, landscapes, and everyday objects into richly layered, color-saturated worlds. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, her work is deeply influenced by her upbringing, a love of outsider art, and a fascination with pattern, architecture, and personal symbolism.

Blending the real and imagined, Roxa creates intricate compositions through a process of metaphorical collage, sourcing imagery from personal archives and online sources. Her interior “roomscapes,” devoid of human figures but filled with evidence of life, stand in contrast to cityscapes populated by tiny figures—each work a meditation on memory, space, and the traces we leave behind.

Roxa’s work offers a vibrant reimagining of the everyday, where off-kilter perspectives and luminous color invite viewers into a world both familiar and fantastical.

To learn more about the creatives who call Rockella Space home, head over to the People page for a full list of in-depth interviews.

Who are you and what do you do?

I was born and raised in Caracas, Venezuela. My mom was a commercial artist by training and an amateur sculptor/designer and architect. She encouraged my siblings and I to draw and paint in home projects, so creativity was a core part of our family life.

I went to boarding school in the United States to learn English and received a BA in Art History and German from Bowdoin College, ME. At Bowdoin, I took some formal visual art classes, but it was really the art history classes that ignited my curiosity about art. After graduation, I spent a year in New York City pursuing different art ventures, but I found them unfulfilling. I felt overwhelmed and depressed by the city and after a year, I went to Santa Cruz, California where my sister was studying.

There I joined a group of plein-air artists led by Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John, one of the original Bay Area plein-air painters. I fell in love with plein air painting. I began to paint daily, outdoors and in the studio. I developed close friendships with artists and eventually, I began attending art classes at the University of Santa Cruz (UCSC). This was in the late 1980’s. UCSC was a great school for painters and printmakers.

In 1987, I attended the Fifth Year Post Graduate program at UCSC. The teachers and colleagues inspired me, molded my work ethic and gave me the strength to pursue the life of an artist. I eventually moved back to New York in 1991 and I’ve been creating art ever since then. Making art has been one of the most fulfilling aspects of my life although it has been a roller coaster ride despite the inevitable ups and downs.

Refuge-44×56”-acrylic on canvas over cradled board-2023

How long have you been at Rockella Space and what is your favorite thing about having a studio at Brown Bears Studios?

I moved into Brown Bears Studios on May 1, 2024. When I first saw the space, I fell in love with it because of the light. I saw it on a gray rainy depressing day and even then, the studio was bathed in light. I was also drawn to the proportions of the studio.

Most  studios I had looked at felt like hallways with  tiny windows or no windows at all. This studio is a good size: 12 x 20 feet with 14-foot ceilings—the rectangular shape gives me room to step back from my paintings, which is essential for my work.

There are two  enormous windows, almost 9 feet tall, on the western wall, separated only by a column. On sunny afternoons so much light streams through the windows that I had to put up curtains to soften the light. Even with the curtains, the room is bright. Being in this space fills me with warmth and comfort. I love working in this studio.

Have you connected and/or created a community with any other artists in the building?

I have a pleasant relationship with my neighbor Frederick Hayes, and we speak occasionally, but beyond that, I haven’t really gotten to know many people on my floor beyond passing greetings when I’m washing my brushes at the slop sink. At the recent Open Studio 2025, I did meet several other artists—Soheil Heravi Moghaddam and Natalie Moffitt from my floor, as well as Justin Ellis and King David from the second floor. I really enjoyed those interactions and wish I had more exchanges like that. Overall though, I think most people in the building are like me: when we get to the studio, we just want to focus on our work.

I do have a friend, Jean Rim, who has a studio on the third floor. She’s such a fun, lively, and spiritual person as well as a great artist, but unfortunately I don’t see her that much. Each floor at Brown Bears Studios requires a separate key, so I can’t make spontaneous visits to the third floor. We also have very different schedules. The second floor is accessible to everyone and has a nice social area with vending machines, a fridge, and microwave where I could potentially have lunch and connect with others, but I’ll admit I haven’t taken advantage of that space. I’m probably guilty of just wanting to stay in my own studio and get lost in my work.

Tell us about your work. What inspires you to create the work that you do?

I’ve been a practicing artist for over 30 years, and my work has evolved through many different subject matters and styles. I started as a ‘plein air’ painter in Santa Cruz, CA, focusing on capturing the light, color, and life of Northern California landscapes and urban settings through direct observation. After completing the Fifth Year Graduate program at the University of Santa Cruz, I explored abstraction for a few years before returning to figurative painting.

When I moved to NYC, I dove into a huge series of costumed self-portraits, followed by a surrealist period where I painted animals in unexpected settings. I also created my “Mindscape” series, where I borrowed faces from famous Renaissance portraits and placed them in entirely different environments that reflected what I imagined the sitters might be thinking. I even went through a phase painting robots and toys.

Throughout all these  explorations, even when I was working abstractly or diving into surrealist subject matter, I always maintained a practice of making drawings and paintings inspired by my immediate surroundings. This appreciation for the everyday world has perhaps been my guiding light.

Today, my work celebrates ordinary life—domestic scenes, landscapes, and everyday objects—but I depict them through my own idiosyncratic visual language: hyper-saturated color palettes, an abundance of intricate detail, and deliberately off-kilter perspectives. My inspiration comes from discovering the awe that exists in mundane moments we often overlook and translating them into painting.

Summer Oasis in Shelter Island- 30 x48”- acrylic on linen over cradled board- 2024

Your interiors are filled with vivid patterns and layered textures—what draws you to paint these spaces, and how do you choose which rooms to depict?

Since I moved to NYC in 1991, painting interiors has been an anchor in my practice, and over the last 15 years, it’s become one of the main themes in my work. I have an arsenal of folders filled with pictures of interiors that inspire me. For a long time, my grandmother’s home in Upstate New York was my primary source of inspiration. Woodchuck Knoll was an old farmhouse on property our family had owned since the late 1800s. The house was decorated with antiques and family heirlooms, making it an endless source of inspiration. The house was sold a few years ago, so now I draw from imagery I’ve been collecting over the years.

I’m drawn to interiors that have a lot of color, pattern, and objects that tell stories. Many of the interiors I use as sources for my paintings are spaces I’ve personally experienced. When I work from magazine or digital references, I’m usually captivated by either the perspective in the photo, the patterns in the walls and furniture, or the overall tone of the room. The spaces often have a window or reflective surface that gives me ideas about how I can manipulate space and light.

I select personal and emotionally charged subjects to capture the fleeting memory of a place and time. Instead of faithfully documenting a space, I want to portray its essence—to illuminate the spirit of the interior by focusing on the architectural elements, the light, and the complex patterns of the space. At the beginning of my career, my paintings were much more literal, but as I’ve evolved in my practice, I’ve taken more liberties with painting interiors. Unless I’m doing a commission, sometimes the finished painting only retains one or two elements from the original source, transforming into something entirely new while still holding onto that initial spark of inspiration.

“Magnetoreception” (biodictionary term), drawn in pen, digitally painted

Many of your works are devoid of figures, yet they feel incredibly alive. How do you think about the presence—or absence—of people in your paintings?

It’s true—my interiors are mostly absent from people, yet they’re filled with signs of human life: personal objects, furniture, and daily items that tell stories of lived experiences. I carefully curate the objects and furniture in my paintings to create spaces that are imbued with personality. It’s in the details of the piece—the patterned rugs, the colorful walls, the pillows, the way objects on tables are arranged, the miscellany that accumulates on a bookshelf, the plants—all elements that people chose to live with and that serve as storytelling devices. These paintings give viewers an opportunity to feel the energy of the place and to invest time piecing together their own interpretation of the story told within the interior.

I also paint landscape paintings, but these aren’t devoid of people. I’ve painted a series of NYC landscapes from a bird’s-eye perspective: Coney Island, Union Square, Columbus Circle, the US Open. In these paintings, tiny figures pepper the cityscapes. In some ways, these tiny figures tell stories much like the objects in my interiors tell stories—both serve as evidence of human presence and activity, whether intimate and personal or part of the larger urban rhythm. The absence or presence of actual figures becomes less important than the traces of life itself.

Oblivious-40×48″- acrylic on canvas over cradled board- 2023

Your background spans Venezuela, and the U.S. How do these cultural experiences influence the way you view and construct space in your work?

Growing up in Venezuela exposed me to a different relationship with color, pattern, and domestic space than what I later encountered in the U.S. The vibrancy and layered textures that fill Latin American interiors—the way pattern and color coexist without restraint in a space—definitely inform how I approach space in my paintings. When I moved to the U.S., I became more conscious of these differences in how spaces are conceived and inhabited.

My exposure to Indian/Persian and Balinese miniature painting has also been important in my work. While I’ve explored miniature painting myself, my work doesn’t have the precision or delicacy of the Indian and Balinese classical traditions. Nevertheless, I think my attention to detail stems from that exposure. But perhaps most importantly, my love for naive and outsider art has greatly influenced how I construct space. In naive art, there’s little hierarchy between foreground and background—everything exists on the same visual plane. I approach my work similarly, using off-kilter perspectives and vivid color interpretations to translate the 3D world onto the flat picture plane,where foreground and background have a similar importance.

Recently, I’ve been doing a series of embroideries over flower paintings, using stitching as a mark-making tool to enhance textural accents and color. The physical challenge of stitching onto painted canvas naturally lends itself to a less refined approach, creating another layer of spatial complexity while resulting in straightforward, perhaps naively crafted images that embrace that “intuitive” quality I’m drawn to.

Can you walk us through your process—from the initial inspiration for a piece to the final brushstroke?

Let me walk you through how I constructed a recent painting: Puzzled, 30×40″ acrylic on canvas, 2024. I use “constructed” because my paintings have to be put together—this one really was like a puzzle, hence the title.

I started with a 5×7″ painting I’d done of my friend William Steiger’s Upper West Side apartment, which I’d always wanted to enlarge. After gessoing a 30×40″ stretched canvas over cradled board, I loosely sketched the composition with a color erase pencil: the room with its important elements—sofa, painting over the sofa, coffee table, rug, two windows—then lightly covered the areas with a wash. When I stepped back to look at the composition, I realized the miniature hadn’t translated well to the larger scale. This happens often when I scale up from small studies.

Then I began playing with different elements. I painted over the rug multiple times, changing its pattern and color. I changed the windows from two to one large one, but it didn’t feel right. The abstract painting on the wall felt wrong too. Then I had an idea: since William is a painter, I used one of his river bend paintings—a bird’s-eye view with parceled land in different colors—for the artwork on the wall.

I restricted my palette to greens, blues, turquoise, and orange. The fractured fields in William’s painting inspired a rug design of rectangular blocks. At this point, the painting started talking to me. I brought back the two windows, painted the detailed city scene (which is actually in the real setting), and began decorating the interior.

I added Paul Klee-style paintings flanking the windows, blown glass vases on tabletops, and a Noguchi clear-top coffee table that distorted parts of the rug pattern. I researched for lamps and found  two hanging lamps that fit the tone of the painting.  I painted a tilted door in the bottom right as an entrance, allowing viewers to place themselves in the scene, then added an armchair with a foot stool in the corner of the room across from the sofa.

The final stage involved painting over and over the sofa, rug, and other areas until everything looked solid and well-painted. I also painted the edges so the painting extended onto its sides. All these moves took enormous time and trial and error. I almost gave up at times, but I didn’t quit—I knew I could figure it out, and I did.

I’m happy with this painting. It’s quite different from the actual interior it’s based on and from the miniature I used as my starting point, but it carries the spirit of the place. Creating a painting from start to finish is a laborious process for me, but so satisfying when the painting finally gels.

Your use of color is bold, complex, and often surprising. What role does color play in conveying emotion or narrative in your interiors?

I love lush, bold colors. I think this comes from being raised in Venezuela, where I was immersed in a world saturated with vibrant hues—in people’s clothes, the colors they paint their homes, the vegetation, even the food. I never studied color theory; my choices are completely intuitive.

Interestingly, I’ve noticed a curious correlation: as world news takes on a darker, more pessimistic tone, my paintings become more radiant and vibrant. Maybe color is my defense against the darkness of the world. It’s playful, vibrant, and unapologetic—the visual version of candy.

Photo by Ben Wentzel (IG: @durpaw)

How do photography and memory inform your compositions? Are the rooms you paint always real spaces?

I’m constantly looking for subject matter and elements for my paintings, spending a lot of time searching for images and taking pictures of spaces and details. Photography plays a huge role in my work—I have thousands of my own photos housed in different folders on my computer: rugs, wood patterns, kitchen objects, wallpaper, houseplants, flowers. I also have boxes of postcards and pictures collected over years, and I use Pinterest and Instagram to find imagery for my compositions.

When I first started painting interiors, all my rooms came from real spaces. But now many of them are transformed—I pull from direct observation, photographs, drawings of drawings, and memory. These forms and ideas get retrieved and reformed as I build a version of a place, often using off-kilter perspective and my own vivid interpretation of color. The result is a rendering of a space that feels familiar and romanticized, yet abstracted and a little inaccurate.

Cats Den- 60×48”- acrylic on canvas over cradled board- 2024

You’ve described your work as a way to “slow down time.” Can you elaborate on what this means for you as a painter and observer of the domestic?

My paintings take a very long time to form. I could complete a painting in a few days, but I don’t because I’m not satisfied with simply recreating a space I see. I need to live with the painting, to observe it, to “talk to it” and allow it to guide me. Eventually the painting starts taking on a life of its own and dictates what’s missing and what doesn’t work. This kind of observation and interaction takes time—I can’t be impatient with the process. I need to let the paintings grow and evolve, which forces me to slow down.

Flower power- 40×30”- oil and acrylic on canvas-2019

Has living and working in New York shifted your creative practice or subject matter in any way?

I’ve been living and practicing art in New York for more than 30 years. Living in one of the centers of the art world and being constantly exposed to so much art and to artists’ studios, it’s unavoidable that it would affect my practice. It’s no secret that artists borrow from and influence each other. Even though one could argue that with the internet, artists don’t need to live close to one another, I believe that interacting with artists in person and seeing art firsthand has a profound effect on one’s work—it certainly has had on mine.

I’m still a representational artist with certain visual language that I’m drawn to, but if you compare the trajectory of my work over the last 30 years, you can see how different periods of my life and the art movements around me have affected me. For example, when I first arrived in NYC, Cindy Sherman was making her famous movie still photographs. I did a huge series of self-portraits in costume at that time, some of them very political in nature. I’m certain that being in New York in the 1990s affected the subject matter I chose to work on. This city continues to challenge and inspire me—there’s an energy here that keeps pushing my work forward, even after three decades. New York doesn’t just influence what I make; it shapes how I see and think about art itself.

What artists—past or present—do you feel a strong connection to, and how have they influenced your visual language?

My artistic influences span from early mentors to masters of the Western canon to contemporary artists working today. My mother was my earliest mentor—a sculptor and graphic artist who instilled in me the love of art. She was good friends with Hungarian painter Maria de Posz, and several of her paintings hung around my childhood home. I adored them and feel they subconsciously instilled in me the love for landscape painting.

When I first started painting as a plein-air painter in California after college, I worked with a group led by Lundy Siegriest and Terry St. John, one of the original Bay Area plein-air painters of the 1970s. Their approach to painting outdoors and capturing light directly influenced my early development as a landscape painter.

At UC Santa Cruz, professor Hardy Hanson, head of the art department, had a profound effect on my work and thinking. Hardy instilled many of my core artistic practices—to be patient with my process, not to take shortcuts when finishing a piece, not to look for easy answers, and to constantly engage with my work by asking questions. I often think of his advice, and it continues to guide my practice today.

Certain masters of the Western art canon deeply influenced me early in my career. Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Vincent van Gogh were perhaps the first masters I emulated, but it was really Pierre Bonnard’s interiors that mesmerized me. I love how he translated his intimate daily life experiences into canvases full of color and light. I also fell in love with Frida Kahlo’s art—her colors and the biographical aspect of her work played a large role in forming my artistic vocabulary. I love Henri Rousseau’s paintings for their naïve and narrative qualities, and I’ve been deeply influenced by Paul Klee, Paul Gauguin, and Giorgio Morandi’s color palettes and compositions. David Hockney is another artist I adore for his playful compositions, vibrant use of color, and subject matter.

In terms of present-day artists, I feel I belong to a movement that’s a revival of  “Intimism,” where Bonnard was one of its pioneers. I love the work of artists like Jonas Wood, Hilary Pecis, Juana Valdez, Alec Egan, Andy Dixon, Sarah McEneaney, Andrew Cooper, Becky Suss, and Polly Shindler to name a few.. These artists, like me, are exploring domestic spaces and personal narratives through painting, creating work that feels both contemporary and rooted in this rich tradition of intimate, everyday subject matter.

Katz’s flowers in the Guggenheim- 30×40”- acrylic on canvas over cradled board-2025

If you could create a dream installation of your work in any setting—historical, fictional, or real—what would it look like, and where would it be?

I love the Guggenheim Museum and have always enjoyed going to retrospectives there. The interior ramp spiraling up the helical incline to the top floor creates such a unique viewing experience. I recently imagined Alex Katz’s flower paintings at the Guggenheim in a painting I completed in 2025, which got me thinking about my own dream installation there.

I’d love to have a retrospective of my work beginning with my early pieces and moving chronologically up the spiral. The paintings would grow progressively larger as you ascend, creating a sense of immersion that builds as you climb. But at the top floor, instead of traditional paintings, I envision a massive video installation—a hexagonal dome where each panel displays large-scale moving images of my interiors. The videos would show one intimate space slowly transforming into another: a kitchen table setting morphing into a bedroom scene, flowers blooming and changing on tabletops, light shifting through windows as day turns to night. The scale would be grand and enveloping, allowing viewers to step inside my domestic world in a way that static paintings never could. It would be like living inside one of my interiors, watching the quiet poetry of everyday life unfold around you.

If you were to invite anyone alive or dead to a dinner party, who would be on your guest list?

I would host an all-female dinner party for women artists, inspired by Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party.” Using Chicago’s triangular banquet table design, my dinner would bring together 49 guests (in contrast to Judy’s 39): 24 contemporary women artists, 24 who have passed away, and myself. Like Chicago’s original, I would include a “Heritage Floor” beneath the table to commemorate additional women who couldn’t fit at the table.

During dinner, I would ask my guests to discuss how being a woman defined their art career, what struggles they overcame, and what factors affected their visibility as artists. I would record these conversations to preserve their voices for posterity.

The evening would flow from cocktail mingling to a sit-down catered dinner, with dessert served as another mingling opportunity to encourage continued conversation.

Here is the guest list

Artists from the past

My mother- Ruth Smith, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, Maria Izquierdo, Hilma Aft Klimt, Luchita Hurtado, Marisol Escobar, Maria de Posz, Leonora Carrington, Stella Snead, Helen Frankenthaler, Ana Mendieta, Joan Mitchell, Elizabeth Murray, Nellie Mae Row, Lee Krasner, Paula Modersohn Becker, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisott, Jane Freilicher, Alice Neel, Emily Carr, Tarsila do Amaral, and Anne Ryan

Living Artists

Hilary Pecis, Becky Suss, Ana Valdez, Margaret Lanzetta, Frances Ferdinands, Beatriz Milhazes, Amy Sherald, Diane Jacobs, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Shara Hughes, Carolyn Oberst, Cindy Sherman, Cara Walker, Kyle Staver, Nancy Friedeman, Nicole Eismann, Andrea Borsuk, Dana Schutz, Lesly Kirbey, Airco Caravan, Judy Chicago, Lisa Yutskavich, Alejandra Mandelblum, and Jean Rim

Puzzled-30×40″-acrylic on canvas over cradled board- 2024

What advice would you give to aspiring artists, particularly those wanting to move to NYC, who are looking to pursue a career in the art world?

I have several pieces of advice for aspiring artists considering the move to NYC.

First, be realistic about the practical side. New York is expensive and can overwhelm you without a clear purpose and budget. Be honest about studio costs, art materials, and rent before making the leap.

Building a real-life community is absolutely crucial since the city can be isolating. Consider enrolling in classes at places like the Studio School, Arts Students League, or alternative art centers. Having artist friends for feedback and support is essential. You could also join online art groups like I Like Your Work, Netvvrk, or Praxis Center for Aesthetic Studies, but make sure you find people within these networks to genuinely exchange ideas with. If your studio is in an artist building like any of the Rockella Studios, that’s another great way to build community. The bottom line is that having a supportive network is crucial to surviving and thriving in NYC.

Create a schedule that balances making art with marketing yourself—successful artists need both. Don’t be discouraged by rejections; keep applying to shows, galleries, grants, and alternative venues. Go to exhibitions for inspiration, but resist comparing yourself to others. Don’t be afraid to experiment, but present consistent bodies of work when applying for opportunities.

Most importantly, don’t rush to market your work before developing a strong portfolio. Take time to find your voice first. Above all, be persistent, patient, kind to yourself, and have fun. Delight in what you’re doing—that joy will carry you through the challenges.

What projects/exhibitions have you got coming up?

My work will be appearing in two art publications in the coming months:

I’ve been selected for The 100 Emerging Artists of 2025: Women’s Edition, sponsored by the Arts to Hearts Project. This international hardcover coffee table book will feature each selected artist in a two-page spread showcasing their artwork and a brief interview. The book will be distributed internationally through Barnes & Noble and Amazon, and shared with a vast network of curators, collectors, galleries, and art lovers across 70,000+ channels.

I’ll also be featured in Studio Visit, Issue #53, which should be released in print  in August. Studio Visit is a series of juried artist books produced by the publishers of New American Paintings. The publication presents all two- and three-dimensional media, including mixed media, painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. Each high-quality volume features approximately 150 artists selected by professional curators.

Color Burst in Brooklyn-30×40″- acrylic on canvas over cradled-2024

Where can people see your work in IRL or online, and how can people contact you for a studio visit?

My studio is located at Brown Bears Studios (1660 East New York Ave), #407.

You can see my work and contact me through:

• Website:www.roxasmith.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roxasmith

Feel free to reach out through either platform to schedule a studio visit or discuss my work.