It is often said that “art imitates life,” but not every artist is able to take that long-standing credo to the next level and allow his or her work and life to become an interchangeable extensions of each other.

For Corrine Smith, an abstract artist, painting is life. From as young as she can remember, she has wanted to be an artist.

“It’s just something I was born with, I guess,” she says.

Smith has been painting for the past 28 years.

In order to meet the increasing demand for her work, Smith says she spends most of the day in the studio plying her trade.

Using this hardworking approach, her art has allowed her to meet these needs.

“I treat it like a job. I have eight galleries, and so it’s supply and demand,” she says. “I’ve worked my way up to that.”

Smith says she used to paint landscapes and still life, but she has now shifted her focus toward the world of abstract art. Fifteen of Smith’s most recent mixed media works will be displayed in the Pioneer Room of the Memorial Union.

Her mixed media pictures are acrylic paint and handmade paper collaged together onto the surface with the paint.

“A lot of times people, when they’re viewing an abstract piece of art, they want to see something. It’s really not about that at all,” she says.

Smith hopes her paintings will be something different than what visitors have seen before.

Relying on instinct as much as a formal approach to painting and her previous artistic explorations, Smith says she feels her work presents viewers with something unique.

“It’s a real formal approach. It’s dealing with lines, shape, color, value and texture. I’ve worked my way through realism to get to be an abstract artist,” she says. “I work very intuitively and just appreciate it for what it is.”

If you’re looking for a deep hidden meaning, you’re looking in the wrong place, Smith says. Her paintings are just about enjoyment and seeing many different colors and textures. This makes Smith’s work more accessible than that of many other artists working with abstraction.

“They are very friendly abstracts,” she says. “They’re not surreal. There is no hidden political thing to them. They are just to enjoy looking at them.”

For Smith, painting is creative relief. The artist says it is unlikely she will stop her artistic pursuits anytime soon because painting is such an important aspect of her life.

“Oh I don’t think it will stop till the day I die,” she says. “This is what I do.”