"Returning Skies"

In each painting I generate associations informed by a number of influences.

In these works I have been particularly interested in looking at English landscape painting. I also reference my own studies of the landscape experienced through travels and walks. I disturb this source material by making collages with photocopies and scanned reproductions of works before introducing my own drawings and photographs of sites. In these works the sense of the sublime is aggravated by disruptions wrought by my manipulations and working processes to reflect the landscape as a site of disconsolence. The landscape, for me, is a place where history and the present draw continual scars and remembrances.

The abstracted forms of land, water and atmosphere become further disrupted by the very act of paint handling, scraping and pushing the layered and textured surfaces until the painting coalesces into its finished state. These landscape paintings offer only clues to specific sites. In these works I become lost through the act of making/painting. For me the process of painting is a process of losing my way.

Painting is essentially an affirming activity. The desire to put down traces of thought made manifest in the physicality of light lends an irony to the more sombre reflections of place. For me the bucolic, the landscape of light and surprise, is riddled with shadows.


Michael Smith, March 2006