Jefferson Field - Spruce and Poplar Painting

LAND MARKS is a collection of work created over the past 30 years by Richard Reitz Smith. Smith is an artist and designer who explores nature and place as metaphor. Usually working with paintings, drawings and prints to spiritually and psychologically investigate places of significance in the artist’s life. Each works act like a window —a type of documentation of a moment of a journey. The total body of work becomes evidence of goals reached or of ones trying to be attained. Reoccurring themes of expansive valleys and crests where earth meets sky explore the metaphor of nature. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania in a small village nestled in a valley of the Appalachian foothills, Smith was surrounded by the seasonal effects on nature. “The hills simultaneously protected me from the outside world, yet kept me from it. The sky was a source of wonderment; a constant connection to the world beyond the crest of the hills, but everchanging.” Studying nature, he found truths that applied to his life. Smith studied fine art at Carnegie Mellon University with colorist Sam Gilliam, thematic and figurative painter Mary Weidner and draftsman Herbert Olds. To that education, he brings inspirations of the Transcendentalist traditions, the Romantic painters, and brush work and color techniques of the Fauvists and Impressionists.