Nicola Smith Brussels 1982

For the past three years, my work has looked to the moving images of Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950–2015). This painting references her 1982 masterpiece Toute une nuit (A whole night).

The film is set over the course of one hot summer’s evening in Brussels in the early 1980s, with a colour palette dominated by pink, peach, pale blue, green and red. Following a series of different lovers, it progresses chronologically over the course of the evening, through the early hours of the morning to daybreak.

The process of translating film-stills to paint allows me to focus on, and draw out, fleeting moments within cinema.

Nicola Smith, 2017