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Tony SmithOrigin: How God and I Created the World1993
1993
$9,500
£7,201.25
€8,408.18
CA$13,306.79
A$14,979.13
CHF 7,925.69
MX$185,797.73
NOK 97,915.94
SEK 93,647.94
DKK 62,729.18
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About the Item
"Origin: How God And I Created The World" acrylic on canvas, 45.5 x 61.5 inches (unframed), $9,500
Tony Smith’s paintings are works in motion. They are thought provoking in countenance and effect, abundant in visual and psychological intrigue. Inventive, ironic, and often humorous, they combine disparate objects, unexpected color and scale, varied painting techniques, multiple light sources, and highly illusionistic passages. Smith’s subjects take an adventurous course, the two-dimensional surfaces imbued with magic, possibility, and surprise.
Still life and landscape motifs fill his canvases. Among many identifiable objects, curious shapes, and geometric forms, are found hillsides, rocks, sticks, and dirt. Such favored elements reflect Smith’s experience of the West: the flat desert spaces, the texture of the mountains, the strong light, the clarity of sight that carries for miles. These are part of his visual personality and instill in his works an association with basic aspects of everyday life and with the captivating presence of nature.
Within this lexicon of imagery, Smith’s paintings are his imagination. Whether the catalyst is an object or experience, a dialogue between two colors, or a fascination with shape and volume; whether the techniques used are airbrush, sponge, hands, or paintbrush, his works evolve from a self-defined logic. Only recently has Smith ventured to paint from life. “My training,” he says, “wasn’t to paint a landscape, I wanted to invent it in my mind and then paint it, or invent it as I paint it.”
The magnetism of Smith’s paintings is increased by convincing illusionism. Illusionistic volumes range from the thinness of paper to sizeable cubes and spheres. Compositions may be simple; or they are a cacophony of elements, their frenetic complexity amassed in multiple layers of humor and irony. A canvas often appears to be peeled back in places, window-like, to reveal deep landscape views, or playfully, to expose other impenetrable surfaces. Scale is manipulated, gravity is defied, light sources multiply, and points of view abound. Illusion, to Smith, is a way of putting things together so we believe they are there. It creates a reality that is “stronger, like perfume,” he says, “certainly stronger than we see with our regular senses, which are so habitualized.” Yet however remarkable the illusion, Smith reasserts that his image-making is inseparable from the painting process. He may juxtapose painterly and illusionistic information; portray a brushstroke hovering over the canvas as an object to be reckoned with; or incorporate a light source that gives objects volume while simultaneously inducing a glare that seems to reflect off a flat surface. We are consistently reminded that the artist’s wellspring of ideas is played out on a two-dimensional plane.
- Creator:Tony Smith (1912-1980, American)
- Creation Year:1993
- Dimensions:Height: 45.5 in (115.57 cm)Width: 61.5 in (156.21 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Salt Lake City, UT
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU154329100542
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