Paul Smith

Artist statement

My work starts from photographs of urban and rural environments: photographs I take documenting my experience of locality or from found images that I appropriate for the same purpose. Photography has always played a central role in my art, whether as the finished piece or as part of the process towards a painting.

Often the paintings are created from composite photographs, i.e. the sky and the sea are from different times/locations, altering the narrative of the final work. I explore the relationship between landscape and memory, from charting the post-industrial developments in the North East since my youth, to filtering the wholly different lights of suburban wilderness on the Pacific Coast of the USA: a landscape that comes to us already narrated by hundreds of forgotten films and re-membered as a series of familiar stills.