AESTHETIC APPROACH

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Confronting a William Smith painting is not unlike the pleasure of discovering some ancient leather-bound volume and being transported by its contents. Smith collects early manuscripts, maps, poetry anthologies and books on astronomy. He couples these texts with soulful, solitary, monochromatic landscape images that he convincingly ages and layers with meaning.

CURRENT WORK

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Employing old books as found objects, Smith cuts and paints on their pages, obscures some text and allows other words and phrases to emerge, thus editing the intent of the original manuscript and inventing a narrative of his own. “I dismantle books,” Smith says. He describes deconstructing a vintage copy of Paradise Lost by boring a 5-inch diameter hole into its pages. The accordion book concept from a 1799 tome his father-in-law gave him led to his epic painting “The Velocity of the Earth.” This oil-paint-on-book-page work explores art and science, fact and fiction, and earth and sky. Smith’s work melds images and text, as he says, “to express a duality of purpose and intention … the tension between abstract and representational, between the ordered and accidental.”

SUBJECT MATTER

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The two constants in Smith’s art are the landscape and the artist’s own technical mastery. Though he has created works as large as 8 feet in length, he prefers a smaller, more intimate scale. Onto these reduced surfaces he renders convincing depictions of idealized places that are fabrications gleaned from genre paintings, childhood memories and the landscape of his native upstate New York and adopted Schuylkill River Basin in Pennsylvania. “I use water as an element of change, to both mirror and abstract or dissolve the image,” he says. Many of his paintings employ the verticality of trees bordering a body of water. He uses this device to anchor the viewer in space, only to push the eye off balance, the watery reflection producing a sense of vertigo that begs the questions: Where is ground? What is sky?

METHOD OF WORK

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“I work on several pieces at once, and my technique is a cumulative process,” Smith says. Whether painting with oil on linen, canvas or panel, he prepares the surface with a lead-based gesso, then draws, scratches and incises onto that ground. Next, he applies an oil under-pigment, often in sepia or a bluish wash. He gradually brings up the image, adds color, first with large 3-inch hard bristle brushes and squeegees, and works toward detail with progressively smaller brushes, such as No. 2 sables.

INFLUENCES

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Smith says he is influenced by the early Flemish painters, Van Eyck, Hans Memling, as well as contemporaries like Brice Marden and Sean Scully.

BIGGEST BREAK

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“There has been no single big break but a series of them,” Smith says. These include an academic scholarship awarded to him while he was a student at the Philadelphia College of Art and a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. When his 1995 show at the Schmidt-Dean Gallery in Philadelphia sold out, it gave him a sense of validation. Also, in 2001, he was awarded a generous Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship in the Arts.