David Brian Smith

David Smith’s paintings freely engage with multiple antecedents and influences, although no single style underpins them. Smith avowedly aspires to a condition of autonomy with his paintings, and they are often unlike anything that one has seen before them. They are animated by fluid brushstrokes, broad fields of color are laid down in transparent and semi- opaque layers, and forms that have been flattened, simplified, or outlined. The works seem to have both a strong sense of painterly spontaneity and control, and of free gesture and concentrated reflection. Paintings can be completely reworked and over painted, thus transforming what was perhaps landscape into a purely abstract play of thick brushwork. There is a palpable jouissance, tempered by an at times murky palette, though candy-colours get their day too, which Smith likes to heighten further with tweaks of fluorescent pigment.

Drawing on personal experience, Smith covers anything from family, love, school days, weddings and the farming landscapes of his native Shropshire, giving the works an autobiographical impetus. ‘Sold’ (2007) is a painting of the sold sign outside his mother’s farm, the wooden post bluntly applied as a final element to the composition. ‘Mutter und Vater’ (2006) features cartoonish portraits of his parents immersed in a landscape formed from a single evergreen tree. It’s a painting that is far from the simple representation of nature having it’s own dreamy logic.

‘Cool’ (2007) is a single sitting, start-stop painting with a restricted palette of two blues and white. Abstract with some perhaps discernible features, it is an assuredly cool study in colour, subject matter being unimportant. The ghost of Munch’s scream is hinted at in the gloomy, swamp greens of ‘Untitled’ (2007). An element of automatism seems at play in ‘I am a Sicopath’ (2007) the words emerging from the sherbet yellow thick brush stokes as if guided by an uncontainable force.

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