Michael Smith
Exhibition “Sea of Change,” Beaverbrook Art Gallery 2024
Installation view, “Overfalls,” acrylic on canvas, triptych, 102 x 246 inches
GOOSE LANE EDITIONS
Michael Smith
Sea of Change | Mer mouvante
John Leroux and|et Nancy Tousley
Publishing date: June 18, 2024
Publisher: Beaverbrook Art Gallery
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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.