BIRNAM WOOD/GALLERIES

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Clifford Smith

Based in New Hampshire, Clifford Smith has been exhibiting nationally since 1976. He earned an MFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 1979; exhibition highlights include solo shows at the Greenville Museum of Art (Greenville, NC) in 1995, and the Midland Center for the Arts (Midland, MI) in 2010. His work has been part of group shows at several museums including Guild Hall in East Hampton, the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga and the Arnot Art Museum in Elmira, New York.

Clifford Smith’s work is part of a number of public collections including the Yale University Art Gallery; the Greenville Museum of Art and the New Hampshire Historical Society. Smith’s work is also in many corporate collections like the American Stock Exchange in New York; Fidelity Investments in Merrimack, New Hampshire; and Texas Air Incorporated in Houston, Texas.

A Realist painter, Clifford Smith imbues his scenes of ocean waves, fields and highways with both sharply observed detail and a sense of passing time. Smith has painted a series of scenes of the high seas, in each case offering a closely cropped image of choppy waves with neither horizon nor anchor in view. The total visual immersion creates a sense of tension and also release.

It is an uncompromising view of nature that Smith also applies to his images of roaring highways and urban landscapes. In paintings like Passing Sunset, the subject at first appears to be a setting sun in a static landscape. Only after thoughtful consideration is it apparent that this blaze of color is seen from a speeding car, the edge of a guardrail a blur against the horizon. These subtle touches add temporal weight to Smith’s beautifully executed paintings. Time passes in Smith’s paintings, almost without our knowing.

While Smith’s efforts to accurately render the world around him make the artist a realist, those hints of motion inject a sly abstract element to his compositions. Glimpses of blurred tail-lights, the ruff of a crashing wave and attenuated traffic lines are all rendered as if from a slightly fuzzy snapshot, though surrounded by objects in focus. This is the world as we actually experience it.

Clifford Smith’s work is part of a number of public collections including the Yale University Art Gallery; the Greenville Museum of Art and the New Hampshire Historical Society. Smith’s work is also in a number of corporate collections like the American Stock Exchange in New York; Fidelity Investments in Merrimack, New Hampshire; and Texas Air Incorporated in Houston, TX.