Jo-An Smith 'Hidden Treasure' — Gila Cliff Dwellings Alcohol Ink Painting

Hidden Treasure by Jo-An Smith is a mesmerizing exploration of light, form, and color inspired by the sacred landscapes of the American Southwest. Executed in alcohol ink—a medium known for its brilliant luminosity and fluid unpredictability—the painting unfolds in radiant layers of crimson, rose, and gold, converging toward a glowing center. Nestled within this vortex of color lies a delicate adobe-like dwelling, symbolizing sanctuary and endurance amid nature’s vast energy.

The composition evokes the sculptural forms of the Gila Cliff Dwellings in New Mexico, where ancient Mogollon architecture merges seamlessly with the surrounding stone. Smith’s masterful control of alcohol ink transforms these geological echoes into abstract poetry, capturing both the heat and serenity of the desert. The painting’s textural gradients and diffused edges reflect her jeweler’s precision and painter’s intuition, while the richly gilded wood frame amplifies its warmth and dimension. A radiant and contemplative work, Hidden Treasure embodies the artist’s ability to merge modern abstraction with ancestral memory—an homage to the enduring spirit of the Southwest.

Details:

• Artist: Jo-An Smith (American, b. 20th century)
• Title: Hidden Treasure
• Medium: Alcohol Ink on Board
• Signature: Signed lower right “Jo-An Smith”
• Frame: Gilt wood frame (without glass)
• Provenance: Private collection, New Mexico
• Location: Las Cruces, NM, USA

Condition:
Excellent, No Damage

Size:
Overall Dimensions: 18.5" × 21.25" × 1"
Visible Image: 10.25" × 13.25"

Artist Biography: Jo-An Smith (American, 20th–21st Century)

Jo-An Smith is a New Mexico–based painter, designer, and metalsmith whose work reflects the vivid spirit and rugged beauty of the American Southwest. Her career spans more than five decades of creative practice in both fine art and jewelry design, blending a designer’s precision with a painter’s emotional expressiveness.

Born and raised in the Southwest, Smith earned her B.A. in Art and Design from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1971 and later received an M.A. in Art/Design (Studio Emphasis) from New Mexico State University in 1975. She also completed training at the Gemological Institute of America, which led to a successful parallel career as a goldsmith and jewelry designer. For over forty years, she worked as a resident designer at the Cutter Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where her work attracted national and international clientele.

Smith’s artistic vision is deeply shaped by the desert landscape that surrounds her. Her oil and watercolor paintings often depict Southwestern mesas, adobe dwellings, ancient cliff structures, and celestial skies in compositions that balance geometric form with organic motion. Using rich, textural layers and radiant color palettes—frequently dominated by reds, oranges, and golds—her paintings convey both the heat and isolation of desert life as well as its transcendent beauty.

In her visual language, Smith explores themes of isolation, endurance, and harmony between nature and architecture, often drawing parallels between the permanence of stone and the fragility of human habitation. Her painterly style reflects the same attention to texture, surface, and light that characterized her jewelry designs—where metals and gemstones were used to evoke landscapes in miniature.

Over the course of her career, Jo-An Smith has exhibited widely throughout the Southwest, and her works are held in numerous private and public collections across the United States and abroad. She has been featured in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who of American Women and is recognized as both a Signature Member of the New Mexico Watercolor Society and a member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

Her paintings—like Sequestered, an evocative depiction of desert solitude—embody the luminous atmosphere and spiritual stillness of the Southwestern landscape, rendered through a distinctly modern, expressionist lens.