Smith, Fred
Available Works: Smith, Fred
Fred Smith’s artistic career bares the traces of a singular event which altered the course of his life forever. A driven and focused professional working in a full-time job, Smith never considered himself to be of an artistic persuasion until a serious car crash left him lying in a hospital bed. Recuperating on the hospital ward, Smith’s attention was drawn to the steady working rhythms of those around him. Amid the hustle and bustle of the building were hundreds of individuals, each of whom formed a critical part of the care provided at the hospital.
Yet it seemed to him that each person around him must define his or her sense of self not so much through the role ascribed to them at the hospital, as through a unique story they told about themselves, a modest, internally-formed narrative which governed their sense of who they were. There was a quiet and humble beauty about people’s movements as they went about their tasks with the minimum of fuss, but also a melancholy sense of containment.
Smith became fascinated by the notion of the internal world that each hospital porter or nurse harboured within them, a story which both sustained them through their working day, and yet went entirely unspoken.
Smith was struck by the parallels with his own life up until that point. He had been progressing along a straight and narrow path of professional focus and containment. He now faced a choice. Either he could continue along the career trajectory which offered such a familiar, unwavering course into the future, or he could do something which addressed the refl ections which had come to him in the aftermath of his accident.
Fred Smith was discharged from hospital resolved to become an artist, and more specifically, to produce an art which connected him to the wider community he felt he had been missing out on. He decided to create works which paid tribute to the understated magic of everyday working lives, but which also encouraged
people to move beyond their private, internal narratives of the self, highlighting a wider world of community and connectivity.
For his exhibition at Meller Merceux, as a conceptual artist, Smith has painted a sequence of Oxford and West Oxfordshire scenes, focusing on ordinary people going about their everyday lives. The compositions are rendered in a naive, uncomplicated style which has powerful resonances with the British folk art tradition and gives a highly authentic feeling of insight into quotidian situations which often pass under the artistic radar. The settings for these pieces include Magdalen Bridge on May Day morning, the Radcliffe Camera, the historic Buttercross at Witney, the Cotswold hills, and the town of Burford. A feeling of romance and narrative runs through the paintings, conjured by the unobtrusive presence of an
anonymous couple holding hands in some of the scenes.
Smith depicts the human figure with a lightness and economy of touch. His is an art which proudly elebrates the simple intimacies of the everyday, consciously moving away from both the cinematic
panorama and the idea of the landscape as sublime “prospect,” which latter has sustained so much of the British artistic canon.
Instead, the minimalistic touches which bring Smith’s figures to life position the viewer fi rmly within the spatial limitations of the daily routine or ritual, inviting one into outdoor spaces which nonetheless take on the comfort and stability of the domestic.
Smith’s construction of art as a redemptive move from the professional mainstream to emblematic small-scale scenarios is a highly autobiographical one. Yet it is illuminating to consider that his commitment to the quotidian rhythms of Englishness evokes powerful resonances with key aspects of Britain’s cultural history. Whilst the modernist movement in the arts, corresponding to what Raymond Williams has called “metropolitan perception,” continues to have a determining influence on so many painters, Smith’s paintings tap into a related but distinct current of Englishness,
