Montreal-based painter Michael Smith is regarded for his expressive and impastoed painted surfaces. Entranced by his paintings, viewers can only begin to discern the representational aspects of his subject matter - barren landscapes, treacherous seas, and passages filled with light - before these elements dissolve back into dynamic trajectories of paint.
Smith is inspired by music and poetry, as well as historic and current events, and engages with his subject matter through rigorous site-specific research. According to art critic Robert Enright, “In Smith’s hands, a landscape is a repository for memory (the past) and a site for making (the present). At their core, they hold emotion, psychology and aesthetics in an inexplicable balance.”
Michael Smith was born in Derby, England in 1951. Smith completed his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal in 1983. His work is represented across Canada and is in numerous collections including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal; the Peel Art Gallery, Ontario; the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, New Brunswick and the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery, Ontario. His latest solo institutional exhibition, Sea of Change, opens this summer at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.