Beschreibung:

Lucien Smith Double Date 2011 acrylic on unprimed canvas 108 x 85 in. (274.3 x 215.9 cm.)
Provenance Ritter/Zamet Gallery, London Acquired directly from the above by the present owner Catalogue Essay “I wanted to sort of create something that …expressed the way I felt about religion or nature…” LUCIEN SMITH, 2013 Lucien Smith formulated his Rain Painting series to combine natural beauty with the wild and rhythmic flux of the natural world. A West Coast native based in New York, Smith blends a laid-back mindset with an urban sharpness for artistic execution. His Rain Paintings are created by pelting his canvas from a distance with a standard fire extinguisher filled with a careful formula of acrylic and water. For Smith, “[The Rain Painting] plays into this idea of relationships – relationships between people and relationships between objects... The Rain Paintings in my head serve as backdrops for situations between people and/or objects, very much like backdrops in a play. They become activated when something is placed in front of them; only then do their scale and size come in to effect” (L. Smith, quoted in A. Simpson, ‘Rising Artist Lucien Smith is Making it Rain’, in Bullett, 27 September 2012) As seen in his series of Hundred Acre Wood paintings, in which the A. A. Milne characters have been eradicated from the scene, leaving just the backdrop landscape, Smith’s Rain Paintings again attempt to visually isolate and capture a natural psychological state of earnest nostalgia and isolation. Intimate as a personal experience, yet universal as an experienced sensation, rain is unpredictable and whimsical. Smith’s Double Date, 2011, envelopes the viewer into a dazzling spray of rain drops and a personal moment of self-reflection. Read More