David Brian Smith

Painting from a photograph is no longer a vanguardist’s conceptual strategy but a fully accepted methodology, reflecting the fact our everyday life is entirely contingent on photographic reproduction, both still and moving. It is the departure from the source photo — the remaking of it as a painting — which interests and engages us. David Brian Smith takes this reinvention further in his repeated, serial interrogation of the same photographic image, the outcome of which is a sequence of paintings that demonstrate a radical freedom from the original photograph as opposed to a slavish adherence to it. His shepherd paintings for instance take the same photograph as their point of origin, an image chosen for its biographical resonance, rooting each painting in authentic personal lived experience, an anchor from which Smith’s painter’s imagination takes us off on brilliant, exuberant journeys, each one a different and substantive departure from the same starting point.

From talking to Smith and seeing paintings in progress in his studio, my understanding is that there is no clear plan to these journeys at the outset. The source image is there — beside the painting throughout — and this defines the composition, but there’s a whole life of different paintings under the final finished surface, and these paintings range from loose, gestural, border-line paint flinging (Smith expunging certain urges in a private performance?) to highly detailed potentially finished paintings which simply don’t work out, and weeks of work are painted over. Even then not all of Smith’s paintings reach a final point of conclusion, and some are abandoned – painfully – as unfinishable.

So what drives these paintings? Their power could easily be imagined to come from a spiritual state of mind, to which we might go further and assign some kind of religious connotation, though in discussion with Smith it’s clear there is no religion at play. The spiritual is left open to interpretation, and mine is that Smith is caught up in quite a simple — albeit a very immersive — reverie and that is with the creative possibilities of paint. Smith has told me before, memorably, that he wants to make paintings that no one has seen before. This is no peculiar or unusual aspiration. Yet somehow he has avoided succumbing to one current trend or another. There have been no masters or overdetermining influences. Doig was an early force, and Smith even went to live in Canada for a while, painting snow scenes en plein air. But that was ten years ago now.

In terms of finding points of reference the dream-like jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau come to mind, as do the sensorial gold-leaf designs of Gustav Klimt. And you could trace a line back to the 19th century Ruralists, and the polychromatic visionary paintings of Samuel Palmer on whom Blake left a strong impression, and on from there through to the mid-20th century and the peculiarly British surrealist landscape paintings of artists like Nash and Sutherland, a lineage to which there may be some sense in adding Smith, though the artist himself has by no means made any claims to be part of it.

While he did grow up deep in the English countryside, the third generation to live on a Shropshire farm founded by his grandfather, it was in fact some tangential thinking about Warhol and seriality that brought him to experimenting with herringbone canvas as a material, rather than the more obvious connection to rural life and countryside garb. It is not only different types of canvas that Smith has tested and trialed, but the full range of available commercial artists’ oil paints, raw pigments, oils and substrates, different types of metal leaf, resins and varnishes. All of which has become part of an extensive palette he now employs to create complex, and often subtly so, shifts in tones and colours, finished surface, translucencies and depth. While forging this experimental path over the last half decade or so, Smith has worked with different styles of paintings from large Kippenberger-esque scenes, to serial, same-size small paintings of abstract patterns, one of which might remind you of Brice Marden, another of the specific palette of Tomma Abts, to cool monochromes created from the dirgy sediment of paint brush pots. It was a journey of many discoveries leading to the first shepherd painting Great Expectations that was completed in 2010.

The source for Great Expectations, and the subsequent series of shepherd paintings sharing the same composition, is a 1930’s black and white photograph reproduced in the Sunday Express, a copy of which was found under the carpet of the house Smith moved to with his mother in 2006 (after his father’s death in 2005, and with conditions for farm trading becoming increasingly difficult, the family farm had, with profound reluctance, been sold). The figure of the shepherd with his flock was especially poignant, beyond the existing rich associations of this archetypical figure: though the farm had been a mixed one, his father’s defining passion had been his sheep. For a new series of paintings Smith revisited the area of the family farm, re-staging the shepherd photograph with himself, in his father’s typical daily attire, now at the centre. The source for the Ant Hill paintings is a photograph taken in 1912 in Bangalore by Fred Goodwill, the artist’s great-grand father, who was a colonial explorer, a vicar, founder of a chain of schools and a keen photographer. The man sitting imperiously atop the anthill is his great-grand father. The man on the ground remains unknown.

David Brian Smith studied at Wolverhampton University and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. He lives and works in London.