Gary Smith: professional practice
My most recent body of work builds a deeper meditation on the skin or surface of the work, and expands my preoccupation with the grand romantic tradition in painting. It relies on a creative method of intense accretion of filmic layers of paint, pigment and image. Through referencing fragments of space or sky from the works of past masters, there is a shift from the micro to the macro, a decontextualisation that arrests and mirrors a different glamour.
As an artist I use the tools of ‘memory, history and imagination to explore various dimensions of landscape and airscapes. These dimensions include representation and meaning, constructs of space and time and shifts in image technology.
Painting for me is an experience of merging – losing the separation between observer and what’s observed, it is phenomenological expereince, that is, it is felt and transmuted through the body.
I engage in subjective interplays to catch a rhythm that will bridge experiences, perceptions, and temporalities. ‘Body and landscape [& airscape] present themselves as coeval epicentres around which places pivot and radiate’ . Humans experience place as a sensorial perception, it is a subjective, kinaesthetic and synthaesthetic experience.
If you are interested, look at my cv.