Smith College alumna Nava Grunfeld recently opened a retrospective show of still lifes and figure paintings at the Smith Alumnae House Gallery.

The exhibition, “Lit from Within,” will be on display through Friday, April 18, with an opening reception on Friday, Feb. 28, from 5 to 7 p.m. The Alumnae House Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The name comes from Grunfeld’s technique for painting still lifes, which involves a process of layering transparent paint to create an effect that makes the paintings appear “lit from within”: “It’s kind of like if you imagine a stained glass window in a church and the light going through the colored glass. It’s the same concept, except instead of the light, it’s the light of the paper,” she said.

Those works are bold and vibrant images of fruit, flowers, dishes, and other still life objects. A 2010 profile in The Artist’s Magazine said that Grunfeld’s still lifes showed spaces full of “radiant light” where “time is blissfully suspended”; one in particular, “Two Goldfish,” was a piece in which “everything becomes part of a rapturously beautiful and moveable feast of color.”

Even so, not every painting in this show is a still life. Of the work in her upcoming exhibition, Grunfeld’s favorite is “Reflection,” which shows a girl (the daughter of Grunfeld’s daughter’s piano teacher) wearing a red shirt, looking into a pool.

In a follow-up email about “Reflection,” Grunfeld said that she, like most artists, considers her paintings to be “like my children.”

“Some children are difficult to raise,” she said, “others not. This one was my pleasure.”

A native of Sweden who later moved to Israel and Manhattan, Grunfeld got her undergraduate degree at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then later received a master’s degree in art education from Smith College in 1981. Her early work was in oil painting, but she pivoted to watercolor after a time not only because she’d long been a fan of watercolor art, but also because the oil paint fumes bothered her.

As a student at Smith, Grunfeld started an art program for blind adults in the area through the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. After she graduated, she wasn’t able to find the type of paid work she was looking for, so she went back to her former career in graphic design, which eventually led her to be the creative director for a now-defunct department store chain.

Her experience in graphic design, working with shapes and forms, would help the rest of her career, including when she turned to abstraction – which, in fact, was the theme of her last show at the Alumnae House. From late April to mid-July 2024, the Alumnae House featured “The Radiant Energy of Color,” a collection of abstract watercolor landscapes. Grunfeld, who lives in the Berkshires, drew inspiration from the view out of her studio window, which overlooks a lake.

After this exhibition, Grunfeld is happy to take a break from putting together any more shows – the process takes a lot of work, and it’d be difficult to track down a lot of her works since many of them have been sold. She’s still painting “all the time,” she said, but she’s also focusing on some of her other passions, including traveling and taking care of her garden. One of her latest artistic pursuits is landscape photography, but she’s not looking to show that work just yet, nor does she want to define herself strictly as an artist within any one genre. For now, she’s happy to both stay creative and relax.

“I’m not thinking of anything in the future except that what I really want to do is play with paint – play with paint with no direction, letting me see what evolves,” she said. “I want to just not overthink it. I want to just see what happens, what comes out of me.”

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.