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| Graham Smith |
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Graham Smith has exhibited extensively in New Zealand and Australia. He has lived in Ilford in the Central Tablelands for many years, and his work is now profoundly influenced by the surrounding landscapes
I continuously go back to the same subjects, love, envy, hate, the emotions, the stuff that’s common to all of us. I don’t have to think about the technicalities of painting any more, it has become second nature after a very long apprenticeship…. it’s simply the way you do it. That’s one of the reasons I work in acrylics. Acrylics are immediate, easy to work with, enable me to change my mind a million times.
It’s taken me 17 years to learn how to paint this particular area’s landscapes. The majority of landscape painters paint the finery, the dressing, the wrapping, whereas I am trying to paint the essence of what I’m seeing, the structure of it, and the structure can also be colour. Recently my use of colour has shifted, purely a response to the need to express this landscape, and those colours were the only ones that would do it for me. It’s about seeing beyond the surface of landscape to the carcass underneath. It’s a different kind of understanding; it’s about frequencies, energy,
A painting needs to become a conversation between the two of us, the painter and the viewer. That’s what the dots are about in my paintings now. They work, they pose a question, and the viewer has to go into the painting, to the area which is common to both of us. It’s about the underlying energy in all things, the truth of it…that’s what I’m trying to show… |
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