Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on February 22, 2007 of Clifford Smith. Consisting of twenty paintings by Smith (b. 1951), a contemporary representational artist who lives in New Hampshire, this exhibition features landscapes and seascapes that evoke a potent sense of direct and familiar experience.

Mostly rendered in large scale, Smith’s images are often of places seen in transit, a view of a foggy industrialized river glimpsed sidelong from a car window; a glance backward through a car’s rearview mirror at converging roads suffused in the heavy blues of dusk. In one painting, leaves and branches seem brushed up against the window pane of a slow-moving car, while in another, trees and headlights, seen while speeding down a highway, are transformed into an aurora of charged particles. Frequently Smith’s works probe the nature of contemplation, as in Highway Pillar, in which we are momentarily distanced from the dizzying energy of the traffic’s flow by the over-large presence of a pillar below a bridge’s onramp, in which the sunset’s glow is reflected.

Smith is probably best known for the ocean “field” paintings he has been creating since the late 1990s, in which he spans his canvases with surging, pounding waves. Depicting views seen from ferry boats crossing to and from Martha’s Vineyard, Smith places the viewer in a close-up overhead position directly above the water. These wall-size images tap into the “primal sympathy,” intuitively aroused in us by the power and mystery of the sea. Yet, unrelieved by glimpses of the shore and lacking a discernible depth or horizon, these works counter sentimental expectations, their direct perspectives enabling a very personal level of engagement. That the sea moves in all directions makes it intrude on and surround us, drawing us into these works and calling our attention to their specific qualities, their reflective surfaces, dark shadows, and their constantly varying movement, as the waves both recede and come toward us at once. There is powerful sense of plastic reality in these works, as the depth relations vary across the surface, with some of the water seemingly just below the picture plane, some projecting outward, and some extending into depths represented by deeper, heavier blues.

Smith’s emulation of the repetition and fracturing of the sea’s energies is enhanced by his method. Although he uses photographs and drawings as the basis for his finished paintings, rather than creating smooth surfaces, he paints with sweeping gestural movements, using brushes of varying widths to capture the sea’s translucency and opacity. The sensuous quality of Smith’s painting method does not distract from his images, yet he does not restrain his handling, allowing his brushes a certain freedom so that at times his strokes move in directions counter to those of the waves portrayed and have energy of their own. That he is neither overly concerned with an exacting representation or with an abstract treatment reflects his belief in artistic freedom, a stance represented also by Gerhard Richter, one of the artists Smith most admires.

Smith, who has two daughters, at times features them in works in which a figure seen from the back contemplates the sea. Among Smith’s most psychologically comepelling works, these images capture the way that body language expresses the feelings of each subject toward the sea as they each contemplate entering or not entering into the water.

Smith’s images of atmospheric landscapes have a similar effect to that of his ocean views. In River Fog a glimpse of the faded horizon line is calming, yet here the contemplation that such a tranquil landscape would usually invoke is undercut by a tension due to the lack of a ground plane, the hazy indeterminate distance, and the blur of watery blue paint in the lower span of the image, which suggests that we are moving through rather than stopping to gaze directly at one point in space. Rather than forcing an interpretation on us, Smith’s works enable us to find our own relationship to his images, as we engage both with the subjects portrayed while becoming aware of our own responses to them.