Jonathan Smith
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Jonathan Smith spent the first sixteen years of his life in the farmlands of rural Aberdeenshire before the family moved to the Isle of Lewis in the mid-1970s. He studied Painting at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen (as his parents had in the 1950s), before working as an illustrator and graphic designer in central London. He completed post-graduate teacher training in Brighton and taught in schools in Sussex before becoming Head of Creative Arts at Varndean College in Brighton.
Exhibiting with the RBA, galleries across the UK, and Art Fairs in Europe and the US, Jonathan now works from his studio on the edge of the South Downs. His work is held in private and public collections in the UK, the US, Europe, and the Far East.
First and foremost a landscape artist, much of his work is rooted on the Isle-of-Lewis in the Hebrides, where he still has extensive family connections. The clarity of light, the signifiers of habitation in the crofting landscape, and the elemental forces at work along the coast provide endless inspiration. Particular locations, in Scotland, Sussex and Italy, topography, light and atmosphere are important.
Working in the studio from many years of drawings and photographs, layers of oil-paint are built up quickly, using large brushes, knives and improvised mark-making tools. The review process often leads to extensive re-working, and the sense of the painting being both a physically substantive object and a re-creation of transitory experience. The organisation of the painted surface is important, but the sense of a specific place at a specific time is key.
Jonathan Smith continues to challenge himself, developing ambitious cycles of work, large, bold, or small and intensely observed, brimming with light, air and atmosphere.
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Features
Jonathan Smith's painting process for oil on canvas painting, 'Late Night Shopping'.
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