Have you had time to visit our latest exhibition New Positions in British Painting? In the Telegraph you can explore the work of five contemporary British painters, each of whom is unique in the painterly expression of their paintings. One of these five is the artist David Brian Smith, whose work is represented in the exhibition by four large-scale paintings.
David's painting style is one you recognize at first sight. His work with colour is characterised by a tremulous loose handwriting that opens a gateway in the observer to mystical planes of diverse contexts. The paintings literally radiate an energetic charge, but also calm and warm notes. This impression is all the more enhanced by the painter's remarkable work with colour, which he treats differently for each painting, creating a completely specific and unique visual atmosphere. However, the bright and bold colours are a definition that cannot be denied to the painter in any way and can be considered an essential means of expression - if we are looking for a guide to determining authorship, this information will be instructive. David currently has four paintings on display at the Telegraph - Great Expectations II, Meritopia-Night Walk, Ant Hill-Blue Bird and Moon Drive.
Let's stay a moment with the colours, which, as we noted in the lines above, are one of the hallmarks of David Brian Smith's authorship. We'll look at working with colour in the painting Great Expectations II. The painting is executed with numerous uses of the colour purple, which Smith also combines with white, brown, blue, green, yellow and a host of other colours, which, together with the subject of the bent-over man with a group of sheep, create an almost melancholic atmosphere in this work, despite the fact that the painting is not impoverished in any colour sense, yet the overall tonality of the purple subject gives a monochromatic impression. The delicate technique takes the viewer of the painting to dreamy heights and hazy moments, the image seems to be frozen in time, yet we are not bored while looking at it, on the contrary. In addition to the colours, the artist's reworked handwriting, which he uses as a shaping of volumes, brings dynamism to the melancholic subject. Already van Gogh was convinced (we now know that to some extent he was correct) that the world is made up of small particles of existence, which we can recognise in his large-scale work precisely in the form of his redrawn handwriting, whose individual strokes are meant to represent them. Not only has he found authentic expression, but he has also referred the viewer to the metaphysical aspects of his own existence. The comparison between these two artists is more than appropriate in the consideration of technique precisely because of their similarity. A kind of rigidity and suspension in time is also characteristic of the paintings Meritopia-Night Walk and Moon Drive. These are quite different in terms of expression, atmosphere, but also subject matter. They are painted with fresh, bright colours such as yellow, red or green in light shades. A remarkable moment occurs in the case of the traditional understanding of the main subject and background. In Smith's paintings, the line between these two concepts is blurred. He treats the background and the main subject with an almost decorative attention to detail, and the distinctively drawn paintings have a delicate, Art Nouveau expression and a kind of rhythmic repetition of motifs often found in the applied arts. However, the painter's highly stylized expression is often complemented by strongly realistic motifs that demonstrate a mastery of technical execution that, in contrast to the artist's stylized manner, builds a degree of tension in the observer. In the case of the painting Meritopia-Night Walk, we can see trees that are completely fictional, consisting of trunks and rather large coloured leaves; the paintings are very playful, at times even naive, precisely because of the use of some arbitrary basic visual motifs.
Currently living and working in London, David Brian Smith has already managed to exhibit his work in exhibitions in the UK (for example, several shows at the Carl Freedman Gallery, most recently in 2015 with Portrait of farm), but also in Belgium, where his most recent show to date was Imagine Peace (2020) at the Baronian/Xippas Gallery in Brussels. Recent exhibitions also include How we met (2021), in which he was presented together with Marliz Frencken at the Althuis Hofland Gallery in Amsterdam. This year there is an exhibition in India (Tripper (2023) at the Isa Gallery) and also in the Czech Republic, at the Telegraph of all places. Here, David's paintings are on display alongside those of Justin Mortimer, Jessie Makinson, Tom Anholt and Caroline Walker until 23 November 2023.
By Jan Malý / Telegraph Gallery
