One of Michael Smith’s premises as a painter is that there cannot be an explanation with words for his work. A description and interpretation of painting, by the written or spoken word, is some kind of translation but not an equation. Smith suggests that one of the most positive things about painting is the way that words have failed. A painting as a work of art implicates the spectator in its own ways. So while not trying to explain Smith’s paintings, nor more presumptuously trying to recreate the experience of seeing in words, we nonetheless may be able to say some things that assist in framing our looking at these works. The selected paintings of Michael Smith exhibited at Gallery 101 are close-valued in tone and darker coloured that some other of his other high-keyed and colourful works. Acrylic-based paints are mixed with sand or powder or dust of some kinds. In some of the works layers of canvas are applied. The heavily worked, scraped and scratched painting surfaces are coarsely textured, rough and dry-looking. Layers of colour and texture are built up on the surface. The roughly-worked paint is dragged and scumbled over the canvas in broad swatches. Paint is smeared around. In parts, more delicate taches of colour and splashes of liguidous paint contrast with the thick gritty material ground. Flashes of lighter colour appear through layers of mid-tone paint. An atmosphere pervades each painting creating a mood-tone, dark, dense and turgid. In these paintings, light always struggles. The virtues of abstract painting Michael Smith likes to make big paintings. He says “I want to make paintings I can physically fit inside of.” There are several ways to describe how the spectator can view these works. Indeed it may be said that a successful artwork must work on several levels. Smith strives to make his paintings available on a somatic level. The somatic character of painting is the physical, corporeal, bodily material way in which the painting presents itself. Standing in front of Smith’s paintings, there is a physical confrontation with the painting as an object. These paintings can be addressed on a physical level, imbued with the urgency of their own making. The spectator’s body size and body image can be projected onto and reflected in the painting. The painting as a confrontation elicits the idea of trespass. You meet the work and decide how you can co-reside. In another way, the active imagination of the spectator collides with the imaginative work of the painter. In a painting where passions are not dulled by formal compromise, the gesture of the painting acts as an indicator, a record, of imaginative space and time. The imagery in the painting, even through abstract, is nevertheless a mental sense of space and animated gesture, quiet atmosphere and palpable motion. In these darker paintings by Michael Smith, the imagery and mood is restrained, more “gray” than in other Smith works. The rawness of the experience is less apparent. The starkness of the rectangular shape is more emphatic. These darker paintings delay revelation. The painted gestures are more concealed and the time required to see the paintings is extended. The accumulated effect is to slow the painting down. In the darkness and grayness exist the painter’s personal blind-spots, which are veiled, revealed, and re-covered. We may share with the painter an interest in confusion. There is a sense of more personal vulnerability, and perhaps more emotions, more feelings. The psychic space of the painting is at first the painter’s, then the spectator’s. What are slowly revealed, through curiosity and intrigue, although ambiguous and dark, are the viewer’s psychic projections made conscious. In opening oneself to the possibility of the painting existing in the world there is an imaginative act of creation. In careful looking, the viewers recognize themselves. When Michael Smith says “Painting doesn’t use the language of warfare,” he is claiming a position for his work that is non-aggressive and non-adversarial. The tenor of the work is perhaps best described as conciliatory. After all, painting is easy to dismiss and overlook and is generally a poor weapon in any conflict. The tradition of painting as an art is a history of beguilement. Paintings suggest, allude to, and tease meaning. The painting as an object is ambivalent and reluctant, yet is always painted to produce a response. Sustained by a faith laden perception, the spectator of abstract painting will become implicated into the apparently empty space of abstract art, to enquire an to discover meaning. Faith will produce a reality effect to perception. Tradition and history confirm belief. Michael Smith is working out of an English tradition of modernist painting history. The specifically Canadian character of Michael Smith’s paintings comes from the pursuit of contemporary Canadian experience in techniques derived from the English tradition. Smith is not unaware of the tradition of American abstract-expressionist painting, and the history of North American painting informs his work tangentially. The Canadian characteristics of Smith’s work may be their physical, somatic properties. This is a character shared with many Canadian and U.S. painters, which each painter reconciles uniquely. Also important as reference to the peculiarity of Canada are the qualities of colour, space and sharpness of light, and the response the paintings offer to an inclement environment. The fundamental issue for Michael Smith’s painting is to contemplate his position in regard to something. There is a primary sense of asking a question. Smith has said “Painting is a kind of inquiry to discover that which will arise.” This is achieved in these paintings with a superb inability to be strident.
Daniel Sharp Artistic Director