Howard Smith

Proposal:

What is your work about? I am interested in the process of making art and trying to make visible its means and development. This interest conjoins with a need to pare down my means whenever possible. For some time now I have focused on the brush stroke or mark as the basic element I use to build and develop space. I began using the brush stroke explicitly as a structural unit in the very late seventies. Since then, the energy, thickness and direction of the stroke has evolved and changed many times as well as the way it interacts with the support or ground. The brush stroke recently has been short and staccato-like. This contrasts greatly with the simple quasi-rectilinear units I have been using in the freehand grids. Although the two modes differ significantly in appearance they are simply different means to approach similar problems.

Even though I continue my work in several directions simultaneously, the body of work is conceptually related. I am not interested in narrative but rather in the fusion of color, light, tactility and space. My aim is to make an art which is alive and breathes, which is visceral and yet has a sense of the ineffable. I would like to convey a sense of the magical in which a painting succeeds in going beyond its basic physicality and enters another realm.

Biography:

I was born in Chicago in 1943, grew up there and was educated at Colorado College and Stanford University. I have lived in Paris, France, New York City and Pine Bush, New York, where I reside currently. I work in two studios, one in New York and the other in Pine Bush. My work has been shown internationally in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and the US. Galleries which represent the work are in Germany, Italy and the US. My last show was in New York this year at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery. I have taught painting, sculpture and drawing at the University of Colorado, Pratt Institute, The School of Visual Arts, New York University and currently at the City University of New York.

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