Jonathan Peter Smith is a contemporary abstract-landscape painter who was born in Kent in 1981, currently lives and works as an artist in West Sussex and was tutored by the acclaimed artists Stewart Geddes PRWA and the late Stass Paraskos (1933 - 2014). Jonathan did his post-graduate diploma in Cyprus under Stass Paraskos where he met the great late acclaimed visiting artist Geoffrey Rigden (1943 - 2016). He won the prestigious RSBA (Royal Society of British Artists) Rome Scholarship award in 2004 and sells lots of his his art all over Britain, Europe and Tenerife. Jonathan has exhibited widely, including solo and group shows in London (Lewisham Art House, Free Range and CGP Gallery by the Lake in Bermondsey Park) and Cyprus.
Jonathan makes small, impassioned, relic-like, organic-like and richly layered and richly detailed abstract-landscape paintings which have both an instantaneous effect over you but also need to be looked at for a long time for the paintings to reveal their complexity, depths and profundity.
Jonathan Peter Smith - 'Painting 2 (Isle of Skye, Sudden Change of Weather)', 2004, 78 x 96 inch, mixed media on wood
Statement
Summary
Since 2003, my central passion in my paintings has been to create semi-autonomous abstract feasts for the eyes which are shaped by places (mostly landscape, sometimes interior).
A Sense of Place
Every evocative painting derives from my experience in a place and its associations, which can include its: character, colours, climate, space, structure, forms, textures, human history, my psychology within it as well as the psychological history which has been lived out within it. Therefore every painting will have its own personality.
Visual Inspiration
I am visually exhilarated by: colours; landscape structures (urban or natural); old weathered rocks or flaking walls with different coloured layers and textures revealed; graffiti; ruins; and natural landscapes which are all evoked in my art.
Places That Have Inspired Me
Different places in Cyprus, London, Rome, Scotland, Sussex, Tenerife, North Wales and my home have all inspired my art.
Physical Description of My Paintings
I want my paintings to look as if they have grown organically having a life of their own and so I use improvisation in the process.
I use a range of effects in a painting, including: collage, drawing, different textures/ techniques: pouring techniques, incised lines, rips, glazed transparencies, pure colour areas next to complex detailed areas, sanded and scrapped areas.
Mostly my paintings are small, and take years to resolve, building and excavating rich histories in them, and the process combines rapid, slow and improvised working with much careful deliberation.
Jonathan Peter Smith - 'Painting 4 (Scottish Highlands, Sudden Sunlit Loch from Bus)', 2004, 36 X 72 inch, mixed media on board
How would you describe yourself? And your artwork? What drives you?
I'm an artist and I have Autism as well a range of mental health issues of which I have always struggled with against all odds. I am driven always by a need to create new aesthetic abstract realities which display visual and textural feasts and wonders for my eyes that derive from inspired lived experience, which I then share with others.
My struggles can influence my art but there is always a hope to succeed and survive the struggles -there is rarely complete tragedy in my work. Although my art may bear the mental scars, art is a way for me to transcend and create new abstract realities – which have harmony and a peculiar beauty. Even if a painting derives from a dark, chaotic subject, it ends up being balanced/ harmonious and has an aesthetic which excites me, as if I am trying to transcend from that darkness. In this sense, my art is very positive and healing.
Jonathan Peter Smith - 'Sumptuous Globs of Colour, from Nature and Architecture (Lemba, Cyprus)', 2006, 6 x 8 inch, oil on board
What is your definition of art?
I have always passionately believed that abstract painting is a mysterious thing that takes on a life/ reality of its own, creating wondrous aesthetics. Painting is full of paroxical truths: it has long been used for representation of the three-dimensional world or feelings for example, but representation is essentially always transformed into flat abstract images (even a photo does this). Painting cannot be anything other than what it is: a two-dimensional surface with paint over it. Therefore it creates new harmonious aesthetic abstract realities (even from dark subject matter) which I emphasize in my art. Painting is an alchemy – turning the ordinary into something extraordinary!
Where do you get your inspiration?
I'm continuously inspired by what's around me in a place and the whole knowledge and experience within it.
In my home for example, I see continual streams of enticing abstract imagery from colours and textures. Such visual information is used in my Covid-19 home-based paintings for example, which are also shaped by my psychological struggles within it and knowledge of society's current struggles too. I will use the more darker tonal colours I see, created by evening light perhaps - which evokes the inspired subject more.
The history of a place is also important and feeds into the work. I read about the history of the places I visited in North Wales for example, before and during the making of my Wales-based paintings (still being continued) and I use/ used that historical information in those paintings which have layered and multiple evocations and references to place but in a very abstract way.
Jonathan Peter Smith - 'Abstract Colour Harmony (Winter 2015, Worthing Seafront)’, 2016, 10 x 12 inch, artist acrylic on card
Can you tell us what you have going on right now?
My work has become even more abstract, complex, expansive, coherent and resolved since 2018, but always being derived from experiences in places.
I've started a new series of home-based works with new forms and colours, inspired by the imagery and sensations in my home during Covid-19/ lockdown. They evoke themes of great change, mental illness, destruction, disorientation, fragility, but also hope and transcendence. These paintings create a unique sense of place in time, but are essentially abstract entities that still have a strange aesthetic and transcendence.
There is a Rome- based series which evokes Rome's intense summer, its urbanism, spirituality, bright colours, ancient history, architecture and the old weathered walls around Rome. These paintings are relic-like with weathered surfaces.
The Wales- based series evokes nature, a cooler climate, spacious lush landscapes, 19th C ruins, a scarred 19th C history and a violent ancient historical past of endless battles.
I know my artwork is finished when…?
it is aesthetic to me, has a visual and textural excitement, is harmoniously or structurally balanced (in terms of the composition, colour and texture) and when deep evocation of the inspired subject and profundity is realised.
Which are your favourite artists?
My very British yet multi-culturally influenced art comes out of the Asian, European and American abstract art traditions; British abstract-landscape tradition stretching back to British Neo Romanticism and Romanticism; the Cubist/post-Cubist tradition which influenced British artists; and Northern European Expressionism.
So I love contemporary and historical artists like Barbara Rae, Gerry Dudgeon, David Mankin, my tutor Stewart Geddes, David Tress, David Hepher, Lanyon, Alexander Mackenzie, and the other 20th C St. Ives artists, Prunella Clough, Piper, Turner, Gillian Ayres, Gary Wragg, Frank Bowling, Geoffrey Rigden, Scully, Bruce Marden, Jonathan Lasker, John Blackburn, Hodgkin, Art Informel/ Tachisme art, Tapies, Dubuffet, Zao Wou-ki, Kandinsky, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Twombly, de Kooning, the Gutai painters, Frank Auerbach, Cezanne and love the ancient art from Native America.
Jonathan Peter Smith - 'Dynamic Traces on Blue Grey Relic (Transformed Landscape, Cwmorthin & North Wales' Scarred History Submerged and Glimpsed)', 2017, 11 x 15 inch, collage and artist acrylic on canvas paper
What’s your background?
My background continues into my present art. Themes of history, ruins, archaeology (the surfaces of many of my paintings now have an excavated, weathered look), landscapes marked by humans, urban/ natural landscapes, an enriched post-Cubist sense of a place/ space, abstraction, my psychology, deep concept in a work, research, the practice of drawing and photography, constant observation of the world, rich detail and the imagination had shaped my earliest childhood and teenage experiences as well as early works I did around aged twenty. All these themes continued in my work and are still all present in it now.
I have always drawn since a small child from imagination but based on historical subjects. Then I did extraordinarily detailed drawings of historical artefacts and other things as a child and teen. I loved visiting ruins like old World War II pillboxes in deserted landscapes as a child and teen which was also where I enjoyed amateur archaeology.
I continued detailed observational drawings in early life drawing classes. I learnt about research, how to illustrate a deep concept and fell in love with art history on my graphic design and illustration diploma. I did Romantic landscapes of ruins and my first raw psychological self portraits on my painting course. On my fine art degree I did urban and natural landscapes that had an evocative, tangible and enriched, layered sense of place animated by human presence, history, time, sound, movement, a 360 degree sense of forms/masses/space and air, and the attempt to evoke all these sensations.
The sense of the tangible in my art is no longer what I represented but is now the painting itself, but the same enriched sense of place inspires every painting now. I could only use abstract means (like Cezanne, Lanyon and Auerbach) to evoke those sensations back then and so I found early on that a paradox inherent in painting and drawing was happening: I was becoming more interested by the abstract marks I was making and the image was essentially a new semi-autonomous (abstract) reality divorced from the world.
Jonathan Peter Smith – detail of 'Shoreham-by-Sea (Abstract Painting)', 2017, 10 x 12 inch, artist acrylic on card
What memorable responses have you had to your work?
A man who was into more traditional representational painting once saw my 'Painting 2 (Isle of Skye, Sudden Change of Weather)' and said to me, “Your work isn't to my liking but I can see and appreciate the quality in it.”
In 2006 when I was in Cyprus at the Cyprus College of Art, the late great acclaimed artist Geoffrey Rigden visited the studios, saw my abstract-landscape Cyprus Paintings and after looking at them he said, “Clement Greenberg would have lapped these up!”
All images and answered text copyrighted © 2020 Jonathan Peter Smith. All rights reserved.