Spit and Sawdust - Nottingham Painting

I am the daughter of lifelong professional artist, David C. Smee. My role here is to curate and represent my Father's artwork. Born in Cambridge, England, two years before the outbreak of World War 2, some of Dave's earliest memories are of the nightly bombing raids of the 1940 blitz and of going to school as a child equipped with his trusty book satchel and gas mask, walking past homes "opened up like dollhouses." Nonetheless, Dave had a happy and relatively carefree childhood growing up in the working class terraces of his hometown. At age 11, Dave won a scholarship to grammar school and later attended Cambridge College of Art majoring in illustration. Dave started working for book publishers, newspapers and magazines and by the 1970's had not only won Shell Corporation's Poster Prize but also had work published in Designers in Britain and The Association of Illustrators First Annual. During the eighties and early nineties Dave built a reputation as a portraitist and caricaturist, carrying out many private commissions including those of the original cast of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Les Miserables and of cast members of Phantom of the Opera. Dave moved to the United States in 1994 and settled in Las Vegas where he fell in love with the Mojave Desert and embarked on a new career working with the archaeologist department at UNLV. Dave has continued to paint his whole life and 4 years ago, at the age of 77, returned to England, settling in Sherwood, Nottingham to be close to his 3 adult children and 7 grandchildren. Now in his eighties, Dave enjoys keeping active by riding the bus into Nottingham to take photographs of the city’s buildings and of shop fronts that interest him. Then he goes home and paints them. The paintings are moments of time, captured. They are snapshots of Nottingham’s ever-changing face. Some of these places have already disappeared. I’m glad Dad painted them, keeping the memory of them alive. For more information contact me at helena.hup@talk21.com