Michael Smith
Overfalls (triptych) 2023 (acrylic on canvas,
102 x 246 inches) – the artists studio
The Endless Play of Words and Images: An Interview with Michael Smith
As Michael Smith tells us in the following interview, his interest in poetry began in earnest when he entered the Bachelor program at the Falmouth School of Art in the early 1970s. He had the good luck to have Peter Redgrove, a poet and aesthetic polymath, as his professor, and under his influence began writing poetry himself. His interest was piqued by the word games that were part of the painting seminar and through them he began to appreciate the playful capacities of language. The poems Smith wrote at the time were good and he had some success in publishing them in literary magazines in Britain, but a combination of his essential attraction to painting and the recognition that becoming an even better poet was a huge endeavour persuaded him to concentrate on painting. But what he never lost was a sense that there was a connection between poetics and visual aesthetics. What also stayed with him was the puzzling and indirect nature of that relationship.
Recent Exhibition
Michael Gibson Gallery
MICHAEL SMITH “A Part of Speech”
London, Ontario
SEPTEMBER 30 – OCTOBER 28, 2023
Upcoming Book Release
GOOSE LANE EDITIONS
Michael Smith : Sea of Change | Mer mouvante
Publishing date: June 18, 2024
Publisher: Beaverbrook Art Gallery
Upcoming Exhibitions
Beaverbrook Art Gallery
MICHAEL SMITH : SEA OF CHANGE
Fredericton, New Brunswick
Opening July 18, 2024
May 25 – November 7, 2024
MICHAEL GIBSON GALLERY
WATCH MICHAEL SMITH’S WEBINAR
ORGANIZED BY WordsFest LONDON, CANADA
zoom date October 21, 2023
“On October 21 we hosted a zoom conversation with Michael Smith where he discussed the strong connection between poetry and his paintings. His cousin, James Sutherland Smith, joined us from Slovakia to read one of his poems and we talked about nature and the power of the written word.”
POST / REVIEW
March 13, 2021
Michael Smith uses photographs as a springboard to memory in his painting
by Deborah Dundas
TORONTO STAR
POST / REVIEW
March 13, 2021
Michael Smith uses photographs as a springboard to memory in his painting
by Deborah Dundas
TORONTO STAR
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