Colette Odya Smith

Colette Odya Smith, pastel & watercolor on paper

Colette Odya Smith:
A Milwaukee native, Colette Odya Smith is a widely exhibited, award-winning pastel painter whose ‘intimate landscapes’ skirt the edge of realism and abstraction. She has exhibited regionally and nationally for 15 years, winning numerous awards including multiple honors in the “Pastel Journal”, “The Artist’s Magazine”, “International Artist” (formerly Pastel Artist International) and “American Artist” competitions. She also was featured in a story in “American Artist” in 2005.

Most recently she received the gold award in the IAPS (International Association of Pastel Societies) show at Ventana Gallery in Santa Fe and exhibited in the Pastel Society of America’s annual juried show at the National Arts Club in New York City. In fall of 2009, Ms. Smith served as judge of the annual national juried show of the Pastel Society of New Mexico in Albuquerque and taught her workshop there as part of her duties.

Ms. Smith will be featured in a story about painting the winter landscape in the upcoming February 2010 issue of “Pastel Journal” and is working on her contributions to a book on painting with pastels being written by Maggie Price.

She is represented in many private and corporate collections including Northwestern Mutual, Waukesha Memorial Hospital and Acuity Insurance. She is in the permanent collection of the Wichita Center for the Arts. In 2006 Ms. Smith was named one of “75 Women of Influence” in the arts by the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel arts writer, and credited her work among the “artworks I (she) most wanted to take home”.

Ms. Smith majored in Fine Art, Humanities and Education at Macalester College and studied soft pastels at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Her background supports her teaching every summer at the Peninsula Art School in Door County, WI.