About
Van Smith’s practice reflects a fascination with the romantic Canadian landscape as it comes into contact with modern painting ideas, namely Impressionism, like Monet, Fauvism, Post-Impressionism, like Van gogh, and Abstract Expressionism, like Mark Rothco, expanding the dialogue between abstraction and representation. The atmosphere represented by Smith’s work is a place of energy and beauty and sublime. Using a dense matrix of intense colours and memorizing textures. Smith’s work suggests an entire field of colour below the surface, within an immersed painterly touch. Smith brings a creative sense of unifying, in which the artist’s relationship with nature is simultaneously one of awe and immersion. He abstracts the landscape with dense marks and intense colours, that underpins an awareness and sensitivity to the natural landscape, to evoke imagery related to dense quantum physic patterns or celestial maps or vibrant tropical oceans. Iridescent pigments coupled with many layers of alternating opaque and translucent colours shift with the viewer’s position, and a response to light and imagination. Smith’s work celebrates and expands, modern abstract West Coast Canadian landscape painters, like Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, and historic Canadian landscape painters, Emily Carr, and Group of Seven, like Lawren Harris, Tom Thompson, and contemporary Canadian landscape painters Toni Onley, and Tako Tanabe. Smith has created a body of work endowed with an emotional, visual energy whose imagination far exceeds the formal confines of the canvas. His work has been an evolving search for the co-relations and dissonance between abstraction and his love of the land, which has given us insight into both the act of painting and the expression of the West Coast.
BIO
Van Smith is an emerging Canadian Dutch German artist. His work explores Modern art, namely Impressionism, like Monet, Fauvism, Post-Impressionism, like Van gogh, and Abstract Expressionism painting.
As an experienced emerging Canadian artist, Van Smith started painting abstract paintings and drawings in the mid 1990s while at the University of British Columbia in the B.F.A . After attaining his B.F.A, he moved to Montreal in 1995, during the Quebec Referendum, studying painting and Eastern and Western Philosophy at Concordia University. While at Concordia, he informally mentored with Guidio Molniari, where Van Smith created mostly Abstract Expressionist works. However, after leaving Montreal in 1996, he developed a more “minimal” abstraction, towards monochrome and minimal painting. In 2010, Van Smith studied at the Dutch Art Institute, in Holland, to attain an M.F.A. in conceptual art. Smith continued abstract painting, particularly the Modernist idea of experimentation, play, autonomy, with the material, form, aesthetics, line, colour, composition, texture, mark making. In his work, the painted object and process of making are equally important, where the act of painting is about freedom, and the painted object is about expressing beauty.
Van Smith has exhibited painting in Canada, and has work in private collections.
C.V,
Education
2010 Dutch Art Institute, Holland, M.F.A.
2005 Concordia University, Canada, ( Installation )
1997 West Virginia University, U.S.A., ( M.F.A. 1st year painting complete )
1995 Concordia University , Canada ( Painting + Philosophy )
1994 Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Canada ( Colour Theory )
1992 University of British Columbia, Canada, B.F.A.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I present research on abstract painting that continues the Modernist idea of experimentation, autonomy, poetry, by abstracting, deconstructing, reconstructing, recontextualizing, exploring, the material / form / aesthetics / line / colour / composition / texture / mark making, of painting, within notions of “objectness”, “materiality”, and “formalism”. I expand the art movements of Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism , Colour field painting , Action painting , Surrealism, and many Early twentieth Century Modern concepts. There is a conversation between my painting and Idealism; Individualism; Avant Gardism; Zen; and Philosophy.
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QUOTES by Van Smith, 1999 – 2024
- ” I paint abstraction because the process can not be defined, articulated convalesced, known by text or words or subjectivity or philosophy “.
- “Minimalism parallels Nature, not in rhythm, patterns, and feeling, rather
in being a place / site / experience, where. a person may have a real personal human relations with rhythm, patterns, and feeling in real space “. - ” A Minimal painting is like a tree. neither have to have mean
something, rather their presenting of form, shape, structure, is their truest meaning “ - ” Art and the artist represents true freedom in civilization, just ask Plato.”
art@vansmith.ca