David Brian Smith grew up on the family farm that inspires his paintings. Founded by his grandfather, near Shropshire, it was old style sheep farming, which became difficult to financially maintain. While not overt, his subject is informed by the artist’s personal experience of foot and mouth disease, BSE and economic challenges that have beset British farmers.

The British landscape has often been plundered to create imagery of a ‘golden age’ for war time propaganda. While the certainties and place of the land in producing the nation’s character has never been in greater question, Smith’s painting are filled with an immersive reverie of place and optimistic discovery.

David Brian Smith My Soul Hath A Remembrance And Is Humbled In Me – II 2011 Oil on herringbone linen 180 x 150 cm

In a thoroughly contemporary language of brilliant colours, luminosity and dynamic perspectives the public discovers a new conception of the British landscape. The radical translation suggest a new kind of spirituality and series of associations through the painterly material encounter.

Returning in this show to explore the regular motifs of a clipping of a shepherd from a found Daily Express’s 1933 Armistice Issue and a photograph of his missionary great-grandfather sitting on a giant ant hill in India, fleshing out deeper registers of each repeated image.

David Brian Smith Ant Hill 2015 Oil and gold leaf on linen 280 x 220 cm

The work on show, bridges a stylistic shift between detailed crystalline light to a freer, looser and gloopy experimental use of material. Yet Signature to the paintings is a

layering of different painterly languages, the written word (sometimes hidden), and an incorporation of the herring bone weave into the composition.

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