Naivasha Studio & Gallery

Nathan Goldsmith’s celestial emotional landscapes will take you to places you’ve already been, and places you have yet to see but are awaiting your arrival… the past and the future telescopes into the present in his paintings, which are gorgeous portals to our collective inner universe. I wandered in off the busy shopping/​restaurant strip at Grant and Union on a Saturday afternoon and at Naivaisha Gallery (named after the lake in Kenya near where the artist grew up) I effortlessly stepped off the streets of North Beach into the vast spaces he improbably captures on wood and canvas.
I was drawn to a deep blue watery scape that aroused the immediacy of sitting on the edge of a sailboat at midnight, I swear I could reach out and drag my fingers in the cool water, but in the distance the sharply illuminated waves dissolved into darkness, the watery depths that arouse our fears of the unknown.
A painting leaned in the window sill next to his working space evoked an aerial view of a silvery grey arctic desert in the long night of winter, my eyes creating the geometry of snow drifts sculpted by indifferent winds, and it gave me the unique sensation of being alone yet not lonely. I’m giving literal descriptions of his works but in truth these vistas of colours are more like dream maps of our inner vastness, cascades of gold that illuminate the path our curiosity begs us to explore, leaving the familiar turquoise shores.
A triptych evoking a wintry mountain landscape brings me atop an alpine range that powerfully evokes a place that feels eerily familiar, yet I have never been to before: dark valleys, snowy peaks like exhaled breath crystallizing on a wintry day, azure illuminations. I can’t see past the formidable rocky horizon, my mind thirsts to glimpse what’s hidden beyond view, I don’t know how the artist has accomplished this but somehow embedded in his canvas I know what’s there even though it is not visible. How could I have been here, he’s never met me, never known where I have travelled, yet here he has brought me home. To a place I have never been to but I swear I have visited before. Yet will go to. The paradox of this impossibility is miraculously achieved by the meditation of his art, which is the art of his meditation. How he brings the viewer on this infinitely looping journey, past to future to present all unified into the moment now, is an unparallelled gift, that which shamans in our tribal past could accomplish, but is rarely seen in our modern world.
Leaving the gallery I feel a strange peacefulness, a realization that everywhere I’ve been and yet to be is all the same vast unified space. And walking through the welcoming open doors on the storefront corner, a seemingly innocent art experience unearths a profound emotional journey. I can’t recommend enough stopping into this portal that will transport you to other places, even if it’s to simply to admire the myriad layers of light captured from distant nebulla onto his canvases.