Biography

Patrick Smith BA (hons) Fine Art Working out of a fine art tradition in the arena of printmaking Patrick Smith has built up a sophisticated visual language, encompassing a rich tapestry of surface pattern and visual texture. An established artist and lecturer Patrick’s’ work is in many private collections in this country and abroad. Winner of the John Purcell London paper prize and the William Tier memorial award for landscape and with numerous television and radio credits to his name Smith’s work has evolved over many years of sensitive observation and deliberation regarding material and process. Drawing on an industrial heritage and previous incarnation as an engineer Patrick seeks to exploit the rich terrain between viewer and artefact. Abiding influences can therefore be ascribed to constructivists like Vladimir Tattling, and later British modernists Piper, Nicholson, and Pasmore. More recently the Spanish artist Eduardo Chillida who explores ideas associated with the edge both in sculpture and printmaking, gives Smith’s work a point of departure. He uses colour as a device to explore harmony linked to composition. Structure contained within the notion of fragment plays an important role in this unfolding language. Smith’s recent work exploits the direct process of mono printing where the happy accident and element of a chance mark are given free reign, this results in one off pieces, some of which form the basis for the mixed media / giclée work. A musician once said……… In Art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when energy remains that is all the stronger for being controlled, constrained, and compressed Henri Matisse