Easter egg-like clouds, glowing sunrise gradients, and myriad vibrant patterns are just a few of the elements comprising David Brian Smith’s otherworldly landscapes.
Smith grew up in rural Shropshire, England, and his ancestral ties to the region’s agricultural traditions became a major influence on his work after he relocated to London. His works evoke British landscape painting of the likes of the Norwich School of painters, a group of self-taught, working-class artists who self-organized an art society in the early 19th century.
Smith departs from historically more academic styles of oil painting to create works “re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens,” says Ross + Kramer Gallery, which presents the artist’s solo exhibition, All around the Wrekin. In his starkly contrasted rolling hills, farm buildings, and bulbous trees, Smith also evokes the bucolic yet faintly uncanny paintings of American Regionalist artist Grant Wood (1891-1942).
“Rooted in the English pastoral tradition yet boldly contemporary in vision, Smith’s paintings explore ideas of place, belonging, and time through radiant color, intricate brushwork, and layered symbolism,” the gallery says. The title of the show references the name of a hill in Shropshire called the Wrekin, distinctive for its conical shape and a popular place to take walks.
Within the sky, fields, rivers, and forests, hundreds of little hatch marks, flowers, starbursts, and other thematic motifs dance across the surface. He also often incorporates gold and silver leaf to add an even further ethereality to the large-scale, luminous canvases, tapping into the power of color and light to evoke nostalgia and a kind of psychedelic utopianism.
All around the Wrekin continues through November 22 in San Francisco. Smith’s work is also on view as part of Inner and Outer Worlds, an exhibition of international contemporary painting that runs through April 12 at the Ju Ming Museum in Taiwan. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
