Colin Hugh Smith
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THE RIVER FLOWERS
LARA
MOLLY AND BRUNO BOBAK JOINED COLIN HUGH SMITH (CENTRE) FOR THE ARTIST'S RECEPTION
MY FAVORITE YEAR
PASSIFLORE
acrylic on canvas 30 x 24 in. unframed $725
IF IT RAINS
BRIDGE, FLOWERS, NIGHT
GALLICA
IN THE COURTYARD OF QUEEN FU
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POYNTON
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STAPLEHURST |
DUBARRY ROSE
acrylic on canvas
19 x 14 in.
unframed
SOLD
MANDALAY
acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 in.
unframed
$725
QUELQUES FLEURS
acrylic on canvas
51 x 71 in.
unframed
$3,625
Since leaving his birthplace, England, at 16, Colin Smith's lived in the United States, the Bahamas and Jamaica but he calls New Brunswick home. On his journey he's been a Registered Interior Designer, a restaurateur, a rat catcher, a tinker, a tailor, a journalist, a published fiction writer, an art promoter -- and several other things (all legal) which he won't mention here but, these days, his creative energies are mostly focused on making art.
When he ran his own interior design studio -- as an accredited member of IDNB (Interior Designers of New Brunswick) -- his clients included the Province Of New Brunswick ( Fredericton 's Legislative Assembly Chamber and old Government House) and private commissions in Canada , Britain , the U.S. and Italy. While he studied art at UNB in Fredericton, the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design and gained much from workshops with New Brunswick artists such as Molly Lamb Bobak, Jennifer Pazienza, Brigid Toole Grant and Richard Flynn, he is largely a self-trained artist.
My artistic strength, and I'm always trying to flex those muscles, comes not from rigorous training in technique but rather from pure intuition, a sense of visual drama, of being blessed with a good eye, he claims.
After graduating from UNB Fredericton with a first class honours degree in English Literature (fine arts minor), he was awarded a full-term M.A. Graduate Assistantship and he completed and successfully defended his thesis which examined certain aspects of Ezra Pound's London years concerning his involvement in the undercurrents influencing the radical changes which took place in the European art world in the years leading up to 1914, touching on the role of homoeroticism in artistic creation.
He has written many reviews on the visual arts (he was nominated for the Christina Sabat Award in 2001), drama and classical music including book reviews for Saint John's late daily paper The Times Globe and New Brunswick's provincial paper, The Telegraph Journal, and its weekend supplement, The Reader, as well as other national publications such as Opera News and Parliamentary Review while his fiction has been published in the United States by Alyson Press.
In addition to solo shows at Gallery 78 in Fredericton, the former Seacoast Gallery and Sunbury Shores in St. Andrews, the old ABEC in Saint John and the Saint John Arts Centre which it has now become, his work has also appeared at Saint John's Imperial Theatre, the New Brunswick Museum, the New Brunswick Festival of the Arts, the University of New Brunswick's Student Voices show, and ARTgallery Rat in Queenstown. Also he has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at Cobalt Gallery, the Klausen Gallery, the Fundy Art Gallery, all of Saint John, as well as the Kensington Gallery in Calgary.
Artist's statement:
My current work has mostly two directions the exuberant and colourful florals which I love to paint and have been my most popular work and the more profound and soulful abstract pieces in which I play with colour and rhythm and try to express my personal philosophies, my states of mind.
In my uptown Saint John studio, both kinds of paintings are hanging or leaning amidst other goings-on, some successful, some not, projects which involve among other things a loom and several soft-sculpture wall hangings. I'm always working on something, or at least planning it.
