To anybody observing Smallwood’s work, her paintings might feel like a fever dream; scattered memories of nude figures and frank moments of intimacy you once encountered in your sleep—perhaps your own or someone else’s. The exposing process of exorcising those from your mind and translating them into art is still something Smallwood is coming to terms with. “It’s such an intense outlet for your emotions,” she says. “Pouring them into a painting, and then letting [someone] critique your vulnerability is painful.” Still, it seems like it’s all this woman ever had the desire to do. As she says, “there’s something achingly beautiful about it all.”

Elly spent much of her childhood exploring the parameters of her own creativity. Raised in Canada barely a stone’s throw from the wilderness, she had the approval of her parents who pushed her to toy with as many mediums as she wanted. “As a kid I was constantly falling in love with something new everyday: painting, calligraphy, weaving, origami, sewing, sculpting,” she recalls. “I was always addicted to that rush of creating something."

A lot of the time, it would manifest in the woodland behind her house. “I would burn sticks and use that as charcoal, drawing on driftwood,” she adds. “I’d find grasses and weave them together to create little pieces of art. I’d find rocks to make sculptures, and to paint on to. It felt like I was always in the woods looking for things to make.”

If we were to spend our lives unwaveringly invested in what’s considered “appropriate”, the art world would struggle to make the kind of progress that feels necessary in 2018. Smallwood can acknowledge that her decision to paint the bodies of women isn’t revolutionary in itself. Instead, it’s her chosen angle that sets her apart from the predominantly male art cognoscenti that have fetishized it for centuries. “The female form has been a battlefield in art history,” she argues. “Male painters painted it for their own pleasure; female painters painted it to reclaim it and give it agency.”

It’s a simple sentence that captures a pivotal subject in art history so eloquently. “And yet still, it somehow remains a subject that provokes strong and visceral reactions from people. That’s something I’m always aware of, because it’s impossible not to be.” But that aforementioned lens—one that reverses fetishization—isn’t necessarily something Smallwood is striving for with her figurative work. Instead, it’s something more simple. “At the end of the day, I paint what I find beautiful, fascinating and exciting. That has to be my driving force.”

But she’s also an artist who makes her living from her work, and the vast majority of it is sold in traditional art space. In 2018, that’s important to her: a tangible setting in which people can consume her work, but you wouldn’t be surprised if she chose to forgo it all together. At the time of writing, Smallwood has garnered nearly 440,000 Instagram followers who engage with her work on a purely aesthetic level, succumbing to a wider image, shaken relatively easy, rather than dwelling on the texture of her brushstrokes.

That intrinsic lure to the organic makes sense when you consider the nature of the subjects she hones in on. Smallwood flits between oil, watercolor and acrylic paints with her work, but the unwavering unity that runs through it is the way she directs bodies. Be it a single hand dripping with gooey fluids or a woman’s pear-shaped body, captured naked and from a stereotypically “unflattering” angle, you get the sense that Smallwood relishes in the things we find familiar, but seldom expose to the world.

“Without a doubt, sexuality provokes the strongest reaction in people. Especially when it’s something that people construe as ‘vulgar’,” Smallwood stresses. Other situations she’s translated onto canvas and paper include a visceral sketch of two faceless, fleshy pink men having sex; bodies adorned in roses. Some of her most famous pieces involve women in various positions, masturbating. “For some reason, something like women masturbating in porn is completely accepted and unremarkable, but in art it provokes incredibly strong reactions in people”

Incensing the public is something that will always come with the creation of semi-provocative artwork, but the veracity of the insults Smallwood gets are brushed off in a quick sentence—not twisted or dwelled upon to summon any kind of sympathy. “Everything from people telling me to burn in hell, or threats of physical violence,” she murmurs fleetingly. “For some reason, there’s this idea that certain things are supposed to be depicted in art. Even if they’re common in TV shows and movies and various aspects of our culture, [traditional] art is seen as being above that. It’s like you’re sullying the noble profession to make paintings about things that people don’t consider appropriate.”

“It’s definitely changed the ways in which people view art in general,” she says of social media’s ability to democratize an art form that has a history of being construed as elitist. “I think it’s allowed artists to build a career for themselves outside of the traditional structure of galleries and dealers, but I don’t think it’s taking away from people experiencing art in a real life setting, though.”

Instead, it’s supplemental – not a replacement for those viewing it in person. “If anything, it gives people the opportunity to find new artists and shows that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” she adds “I hope that it never becomes a complete replacement for galleries.”

Nowadays, we often see the profession of painting as something archaic; a romanticized job that can only be commodified by those who have the inherited financial backing to survive when they first start out. But Elly Smallwood is one of a few who doesn’t think that’s strictly true. Social media might not be eradicating the traditional art space, but the mere existence of the internet does mean that “there’s so much information available, and so many ways to monetize it”.

Still, Smallwood wants you to know that the harsh reality of art being your career is a lot less glamorous than one might think. “People would be surprised at how much this job involves emails and cleaning the studio and buying canvases!” she laughs. “Sure, sometimes it’s days on end of nothing but painting until my arms ache and my eyes are blurry, but then it’s followed by days of scraping said paint off my floor.”

There, as the physical and emotional states of exhaustion intersect, is where Elly Smallwood finds the reason to keep painting things that make people feel uncomfortable. “Those strange lines that people draw about what is and isn’t art are still fascinating to me, and I love finding that kind of line,” she says. Some might argue her ability to toe it is what makes her work so noteworthy: traditional in subject, but scrutinized, recontextualized and considered. In the eye of an archetypal, wealthy, male art buyer, “a nude female body is fine—but only if it’s slim, white and sexually appealing. Not in possession of its own sexuality.”

It’s that exposing of vulnerability; of throwing open the doors of what’s considered conventionally beautiful and grounding in it a sense of sobering reality that she finds most fascinating. Smallwood signs off, her words laced with a sense of curiosity: “[I just love] glimpsing into something we don’t share with the world.”