Richard Smith (English, South African Artist)

Used and in good condition

After 16 worldwide solo exhibitions, Richards often accidental paintings are a reflection of an artist unafraid to let his brush provide the inspiration. A painter of great originality and technical skill, he has not followed the pack yet has enjoyed consistent success in South Africa and on the international stage. A well-known political cartoonist for the Sunday Times in Johannesburg in the 1960s, he held his first solo exhibition in London in 1972 at the Arts Theatre Club. He was the Standard Bank Cartoonist of the Year in 1980 and 1984 and over the past 30 years has produced works both on canvas and on paper and has exhibited consistently locally and abroad.

Smith is an artists artist. He has a unique voice where the act of painting is foremost whilst form and content are secondary. Although his finished works are richly layered, he wants, in his own words, the brush to spend as little time as possible on the canvas. A fearsome self-critic, Smiths paintings can sometimes take months, even years, to appear but there still is no guarantee that they will make the final cut. This, however, does not deter him in his slaveish attention to detail and his desire to paint.

Although Smith has been producing complex artworks for nearly 50 years, he is an artist at the peak of his powers producing stimulating and exciting abstract figurative works. This exhibition is the artists first complete series of oils since 1998.