Claude Smith
Notes
Drawings / Paintings
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Bio / Artist Statement:
Claude Smith born 1951 (NYC) Smith grew up in a family of artists. His father, Sidney Smith was a masterful painter and calligrapher who introduced young Claude to the world of calligraphy, gesture drawing and the traditional tools of the trade, setting the trajectory of his life's work. Formal studies began at the Art Students League of New York in 1964, and he earned a BFA from Pratt Institute in 1971. By the late 1970s writing-as-drawing, drawing-as-writing was becoming an integral part of his creative process. Gesture drawing that tended to be thread-like and elastic lent itself to the development of his expressive free hand and served as a bridge between writing and drawing. This gradually morphed into asemic writing, or wordless writing with no semantic content. |
Over time he added non traditional surfaces to paint on and unorthodox, eccentric mark making tools that yielded unpredictable and surprising results.
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Beginning in the 1990s Smith began working closely with musicians, often free-jazz composers and players who were exponents of a more fearless, daring improvisational approach to the creative process. At the vanguard of the free-jazz movement was composer/pianist Cecil Taylor who inspired many of the works in this exhibition.
In the words of musician, and sometimes Smith collaborator, Richard Osborn : it's the dark space of the blackboard that intrigues me in Claude's painting, the place of speculation and possibility and discovery, its association with thinkers and dreamers working out equations and relationships and imagery, re-imagining their understanding of the universe...it reveals that the darkness is not truly empty; like the universe's deep space, it is a delicate but resilient and living membrane, an "empty fullness."
...a vast matrix of invisible gravitational lines laced with speeding light and energy. It embodies the fragility, boldness, anxiety and joy of reaching out to something unsuspected, the pentimentos of erased areas and residues from past events, all birthing new lines that are not afraid to appear awkward, or whose beauty requires a new vision.
...Freehand means drawing freely beyond templates, patterns, known forms, but informed by hard-won mastery. Seeking and finding and expressing all in the same moment, revealing the totality of Claude Smith's state of being.
...This is the edgy yet wonder-filled experience of free exploration in the darkness of unknowing: both empty and full, tentative and assured, riding ahead on the point of the arrow of time.
Claude Smith maintains a studio in Graton, California and has his work in private collections in the U.S. and Europe. He has had solo exhibitions in NYC, Los Angeles and group shows internationally.
Beginning in the 1990s Smith began working closely with musicians, often free-jazz composers and players who were exponents of a more fearless, daring improvisational approach to the creative process. At the vanguard of the free-jazz movement was composer/pianist Cecil Taylor who inspired many of the works in this exhibition.
In the words of musician, and sometimes Smith collaborator, Richard Osborn : it's the dark space of the blackboard that intrigues me in Claude's painting, the place of speculation and possibility and discovery, its association with thinkers and dreamers working out equations and relationships and imagery, re-imagining their understanding of the universe...it reveals that the darkness is not truly empty; like the universe's deep space, it is a delicate but resilient and living membrane, an "empty fullness."
...a vast matrix of invisible gravitational lines laced with speeding light and energy. It embodies the fragility, boldness, anxiety and joy of reaching out to something unsuspected, the pentimentos of erased areas and residues from past events, all birthing new lines that are not afraid to appear awkward, or whose beauty requires a new vision.
...Freehand means drawing freely beyond templates, patterns, known forms, but informed by hard-won mastery. Seeking and finding and expressing all in the same moment, revealing the totality of Claude Smith's state of being.
...This is the edgy yet wonder-filled experience of free exploration in the darkness of unknowing: both empty and full, tentative and assured, riding ahead on the point of the arrow of time.
Claude Smith maintains a studio in Graton, California and has his work in private collections in the U.S. and Europe. He has had solo exhibitions in NYC, Los Angeles and group shows internationally.