Carl Smith
For some time now I have been refining a technique where I make images from my photos, drawings, and found materials by cutting them all up into small pieces and then assembling them together into loosely narrative collages. Because I try many different combinations before I am finished with one image I like to think of this technique as ëdrawing with picturesí. I take these various collage elements and use them in the place of marks drawn by a pencil or paint brush. Once I have settled on an image I silk screen print it on canvas and then stretch the canvass to be painted with oil paints . The final result of all this is a hand painted image with a graphic quality that floats on the ambiguous background created by canvasí rough surface . Two other bi-products of this process are hand painted prints on paper in small editions of five or less and books which have been created by printing on top of the pages of pre-existing books.
In my life I have worked with almost every medium that visual art can be made from starting with ceramics while I was still in high school, through welding and metal sculpture in the early part of my college years, and completing my studies in New York at Cooper Union with a focus on silkscreen, photography, and painting. Along the way there have been hundreds of diversions and experiments where I found myself working with wood, glass, paper mache, video, music, stone, plexiglass, cement, and even styrofoam. The one thing I have taken away from all these materials is that they all have a voice of their own and that an artist must let it speak. Many of these materials already have a place in art history that must be acknowledged and incorporated into the work to participate honestly in contemporary visual culture. When these physical attributes are integrated well into a work of art the final product can be more than sum of its parts and this physical object made from common materials can have an almost transcendent quality about it.
In this age of slick advertisements and seamless computer imagery it is important for me to allow the steps of the process I use to show through and to embrace the small accidents and coincidences that happen along each step of the way. It would be a great loss of character for my work to try to hide the inconsistencies and ëerrorsí that accumulate as I go. From the initial collage, through the reproduction stage, and onto to the painting process there is a moment when the nature of each material I am working with should be allowed to come through and contribute something. In that way my method of working is like a cultivated series of mistakes to allow sponataneity and life to come into the work. When printing and painting on the pages of preexisting books the possibilities for exciting and unintentional combinations of symbols and colors is always present.
Stemming from an ongoing habit of keeping journals and sketchbooks I try to carry the recording of personal history over into my paintings to offer sometimes very quiet examples of distilled experience and other times stream of consciousness oriented imagery where scale and logic get put aside in the place of sheer perception. I want these pictures to offer a viewer something like a visual poem that holds them for a moment and transports them, if only for an instant, into another place. That place is often a world of nostalgia for pasts that may have never existed and where rationality serves only as a basic framework. Generally I have built into each painting a small comment contained in it that is meant to be like a person whispering something subtle and humorous in your ear.
