David Brian Smith

As the title may suggest, the theme of David Brian Smith’s fourth solo exhibition is inspired by the family farm where he grew up in the English countryside. Founded by his grandfather near Shropshire, England, the farm matured for three generations before the cost of upkeep outgrew the inherited practice of raising sheep. The seven paintings on view have familiar figures, resonating with his personal history and oeuvre, as they will with our own sense of rural experience: hay bales, a horse and rider, a flock of sheep, a shepherd. Returning to this point of origin as if to dig up his own past, and one left far behind by the modern period, Smith instead finds the farm as a point of departure.

While his paintings often take the same compositional structure, sourced from a found newspaper clipping of a shepherd, or a photograph of his great-grandfather sitting on an anthill, Smith radically translates these images through the use of paint. Each portrait or landscape is endowed with a familiarity of the farm’s form and weight. But this is to be the only consistent element, which dissolves or stiffens or grows into a work all of its own. To flesh out the deeper registers of each repeated image – and it is Smith that follows the painting, not the other way around – he employs the use of oil, raw pigments, resins, and varnishes, and a rubbery black used to coat the bottom of boats.

We may be tempted to assign a religious connection to Smith’s paintings, but it is clear there is no such association. It is left open to the imagination. But as any consistent idea of a religious power or God has also, in a sense, ‘died out’ in the modern period, one might think of repetition of image and communion with paint a new kind of spirituality. In that sense, Smith emerges from a particular lineage of British landscape painters, from 19th century Ruralists to 20th century surrealist painters like Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, seeking an immersive reverie in place, although he makes no claim to be a part. His only aspiration is to make paintings that no one has made before.

David Brian Smith studied at Wolverhampton University and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. He lives and works in London. He was awarded the Royal Academy Landscape Painting Award in 2005. Forthcoming exhibitions in 2016 include Albert Baronian, Brussels and Saatchi Gallery, London.