Placement Print

Tim Smith’s paintings come from a diverse variety of inspirations and ideas. He once responded to being asked where his paintings came from with a bizarre but engaging list, given immediately without pausing: Sunrise, Cherry Blossom, Winter trees, the night sky, comets, Rothko, “L'Atelier au Mimosa” in The Pompidou Centre, Summer and Winter Solstices, films involving time travel, Thor Ragnarok, seeing George Best play, the underdog, the Border Collie, Pegasus, a lunar eclipse, astronomical illustration, Steve Ditko, Miro, Vermeer’s Milkmaid, accidental spillages of paint, those nights we had in Florence, Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, the daring Utagawa Hiroshige waterfalls English landscape painting, Arshile Gorky, window views, the importance of edges, rugs, the stories of young children, 1970s Marvel comics, poetry, the equal love of painterly and hard edged abstraction, our years in Oxford, The Yorkshire Wolds, The Rijksmuseum, deceptive space, Matisse, Mythology, A Silver Birch in the sunlight against the dark, Charles Burchfied, camping holidays in Europe, Tetris, the versatility of paint and the endurance of painting, early mornings in Summer. Redon. Graphs. The cross amongst the corn. Zeuxis And Parrhasios. South Pacific. At the heart of his work is the belief that there are too many good ideas in the world appearing each day to paint the same things all the time, in the same approach. Most recent paintings focus on the development of ambiguous spaces and borders, apertures, framing and creating a continuation of the painting beyond the composition. These small paintings seem to shine like jewels, changing with the light at different times of the day and whilst appearing abstract and decorative at times, they retain substance and relevance to the world in the references to spaces and moments important to us. He has exhibited his paintings both nationally and internationally, and has work in private collections in Canada, the USA, Asia, Ireland, UK and Europe.