Michael Smith
February 12 – March 10, 2010
Studio 21 Fine Art is pleased to announce a new exhibition of work by gallery artist, Michael Smith.
In Michael Smith’s energetic paintings, landscapes emerge from very active paint handling. His works are lush with mottled colour, and linger in a place somewhere between representation and abstraction. Their luminous sense of lighting harks back to the time of Turner & the Romantics. At the same time, they employ a vigorous painting style with scraped and textural surfaces akin to the approach of the Abstract Expressionists or “action painters”. Describing this cathartic process, Smith states:
“The landscape, for me, is a place where history and the present draw continual scars and remembrances. The abstracted forms of land, water and atmosphere become further disrupted by the very act of paint handling - scraping and pushing the layered and textured surfaces until the painting coalesces into its finished state.”
-Michael Smith
Born in the UK, Michael Smith has lived in Québec since 1978. He completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Concordia University in 1983, remaining to teach part-time until 1989. He became full-time instructor in fine arts at Dawson College in 1990 and has been a teacher/advisor for the Graduate Program at Vermont College, USA. His work has been exhibited in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, Brussels and Ocala, Florida. Recent group exhibitions have featured his work in Kaohsiung (Taiwan), The Appleton Museum, Florida, and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Smith’s works are to be found in a many important public collections, including those of The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musee d’art Contemporain, Montreal, the Musée du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Concordia University; the University of Lethbridge and the Canadiana Fund. In the last several years, Michael Smith has received awards from both the Conseil des arts et des letters du Quebec and the Canada Council.
