Some collections begin with an intention. This one began with several of them, years apart, but quietly accumulating until the paintings arrived.
Ian Rayer-Smith spent several nights sleeping under the stars in the south of Portugal, a region with a spiritual quality that draws people from across the world in search of something harder to name. Those nights left a mark. Not as a direct influence on any single canvas, but as a seed. It took its time to take root and is now very much in bloom.
Closer to home, five minutes from his Stockport studio, a wooded area opens up without warning from what is otherwise an industrial landscape. The transition is abrupt and complete; graffiti giving way to trees, concrete to earth, noise to quiet. It was here that Rayer-Smith painted outside for the first time, departing from the studio-based practice that has defined his work. The experience of being inside nature rather than observing it from a distance left its own impression.
Air Between Leaves sits at the point where those experiences converge. Greens and blues carry the weight of the work almost as the emotional reflection of the natural world. These are paintings that carry a sense of timelessness, of environments that exist entirely outside the pace of modern life. In a world of screens and noise, that quality feels increasingly significant.
Air Between Leaves does not ask you to look at nature. It asks you to feel what it is to be briefly returned to it.