Artist Statement
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Artist Statement
Painting is a mystery; my practice is grounded by the necessity to understand it. How painting interrelates with others is the impetus. I use abstraction in communicating the nuance and poetics of a human experience. Personal narratives that chronicle the conflicted realities present in day-to-day interpersonal relationships are my inspiration. I am interested in juxtaposing and contradictory truths found in how we relate to each other as beings influenced by positive and negative aspects of society. I embrace the ambiguities of a more expressionist practice, creating conceptual mechanisms that allow for these inferences to inform the physical assertion of paint. Shaped canvases populated with geometric forms that oscillate from amorphous to representational and meanings that hover between the suggestive and the indecipherable are the result of this process. My concern with the viewer and notions of the parallax is responsible for the shift in my newest works. Construction lumber, cubed structures, and veils are the repeating characters in these abstractions. Familiar and simplified in shape, I twist, contort, and flatten these forms in space. They inhabit environments fraught with stasis. The relative values of paint represent a state of stability, where all forces and working mechanisms are equal and opposing, canceling out each other and, in doing so, forging a better representation of the cyclical, unsolvable realities found in our shared human experience. Allegorically, my characters, embodying human emotion, rival each other within a world articulated though color and spatial tensions, a world whose conditions aren’t different from our own. [End Page 867]
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Leslie Smith III, Night Mass (2013) Oil on shaped canvas (27” x 27”)
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Leslie Smith III, Juliet’s Big City Dreams (2012) Oil on shaped canvas (27” x 27”)
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Leslie Smith III, Night Twitch (2013) Oil on shaped canvas (42” x 42”)
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Leslie Smith III, Honest Boy (2013) Oil on shaped canvas (42” x 42”)
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LESLIE SMITH III, born in 1985 in Silver Spring, Maryland, teaches painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He tells us that his studio practice “is concentrated around visual abstraction as a method for communicating anguish.” He is currently working on a series that focuses on “psychological trauma as something we violently inflict on each other, as an effect of human power dynamics,” a body of work that portrays “the nature of fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress amongst other negative aspects of the human experience.” His work has garnered for him such honors and awards as a summer fellowship to the American Academy in Rome and an Al Held Affiliate Residency Fellowship in Rome. After he completed the BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2007, he entered Yale University and completed the MFA in painting and printmaking. He has exhibited his work in museums and galleries in New York, Baltimore, Houston, Birmingham, New Haven, Miami, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and other locations in the USA.
