Cruciferous, 2008 Oil on Canvas by Stacy Stewart Smith

Cruciferous does not ask to be understood. It asks to be felt.

At 54" × 80", this monumental oil on canvas pulls the viewer into a kinetic landscape — the interior of the Eiffel Tower seen from a moving elevator, rendered not as record but as revelation. Smith’s Abstractrealism transforms iron and light into something ancient: a composition that breathes, shifts, and watches.

And it does watch. At the center of the work, a pair of eyes — enlarged, deliberately off-scale — hold the gaze of anyone who enters the room. They are Smith’s own eyes, caught in the reflection of the elevator’s windowpanes during a 2005 visit, later studied and refined during a solitary Paris stay in 2007. Transposed onto the canvas, they become something beyond self-portrait: a guardian presence, luminous and still, hovering between the human and the angelic.

Across the surface, stenciled pixel-squares of color punctuate the image — the same signature intrusions found throughout the Resurrection series. Here they carry particular weight. The large cruciform structure rising on the right of the canvas makes the painting’s spiritual axis unmistakable, and the eyes above it become something the viewer must reckon with: a resurrected presence, a witness, a grace.

Cruciferous is a painting that changes depending on where you stand — and who you are when you stand there.

Oil on Canvas · 54" × 80" · 2008
One-of-a-kind original. Shipping insurance is strongly recommended; please add it to your purchase.