Brad Smith - Artist's Statement

I am able to paint exactly what I see, without conscious effort. I'm referring to the physical world and to my imagination, some big territory. I have had wonderful feedback from clients and collectors. It has helped me paint more consistently from my heart. I have a wide range of inspirations and appreciate that each demands a different approach. This excites me as I feel my way through each painting, realistic or abstract. The more I paint, the more inspiration comes, and the more I want to paint.

I find more confidence with each painting I complete. New ideas, new challenges motivate me. I feel like I am just beginning to paint, and I want always to feel that way. Life is a teacher, the paint is a teacher. Neither ever quits, if there is a willing student. Learning is such a rush. Who would ever want to stop?

The greatest satisfaction comes when clients want my paintings in their collections. If my paintings bring positive energy and emotion to a collector's environment, I am so grateful to have that effect through my work. My work is optimistic. It's an honor to share it with others. It just doesn't get better than that.

I struggle to live in the moment and appreciate everything that is happening. I can't imagine expressing that any other way than painting. If I haven't already, I hope that someday I have the privilege of sharing a painting with you.

Brad Smith - About the Artist

From his earliest memories of childhood forward, Smith has needed no persuasion to acquaint himself intimately with art. Smith’s lifelong compulsion to make music, to draw, to paint, and to relish every kind of learning, bears exquisite fruit in the paintings he creates today.

Smith developed a referral clientele and gallery following in Dallas in the 80’s, doing portraits and murals. He worked in a disciplined palette that gave a certain austerely formal gravitas to his portraits of the women of Dallas. He tempered this with contemporary stylistic riffs and with exquisite skin tones and facial expressions and poses that reveal personality and character. In family and couples portraiture, the artist seems to have given in to a longing for more light and color, for the expression of lighter mood. That readiness to burst into an artist’s wonderland of color found fulfillment only after Smith moved to Santa Fe in 2000, leaving a career as a professional musician behind to focus completely on painting. His paintings sold briskly from the start allowing him to open his own gallery in 2006. His highly sought after work is now collected internationally and he is celebrated as one of the best selling artists on Canyon Road.

His creative spirit and his palette open up completely to the enticements of pure and luscious chroma. Color has been a signature element in Smith’s paintings ever since, vivid, alive, skillfully orchestrated to work harmoniously in splendid variety. Smith arranges shapes, forms, colors, and textures, with a surety of eye and hand that suggest extensive education and experience in both studio art and art history, but his formal education stopped after high school. The artist’s ability to make a beautiful surface, and then transcend it in figuratives and portraiture is partly natural and partly the result of self-directed learning, observation, experimentation, and practice, all in passionate mode. Smith’s compositions have music in them, balanced, nuanced, rhythmic and flowing here, staccato and syncopated there. Smith paints what is visible and suggests with finesse, delicacy, and sensitivity what is not. Motivated by the urge to cultivate, to make things grow, Smith includes plants and flowers in settings and as subjects. He has developed an equally wide range of artistic approaches, each tailored uniquely to the needs of the particular subject. More than half Smith’s paintings are of women—elegant, at ease, naturally graceful, naturally beautiful in their exquisite variety and in the exquisite settings Smith conjures for them. Patterns and colors relate to each other in opposition and harmony in all of Smith’s paintings, just as they do in the lives of the subjects Smith explores. Smith’s gallery encompasses contemporary romanticism and abstract expressionism side by side, differentiated by degree of abstraction, united by compositional and technical brilliance. It’s easy to see why Smith’s paintings resonate easily with an ever-widening field of collectors.

copyright © 2010 Brad Smith Gallery

home | about the artists | Brad Smith paintings | Toru Oba sculptures | contact