Howard Smith, River Run #3, 1987–88. Oil on linen, 10 × 8 ½ inches.
EFA Studio Artist Howard Smith received two reviews in Brooklyn Rail for his retrospective Tomorrow isn’t Yesterday, on view at the Jane Lombard Gallery through October 24.
“Remarkably, Howard Smith proves himself to be, in this vast, punctilious retrospective, more than a painter of considerable subtlety, but also a practitioner of various genres that together write his place in the abstractionist art history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is as much a sculptor, who, as he builds with color creating layered imagery, is a poet able to describe in words the weight of his paintings and what constitutes them. He is something of a musician, as he generates motion and emotion with color intensity gradually emerging. Not least, he is a psychologist, as he seems to parse moods and attitudes through subtle tonalities.” ―Barbara A. MacAdam
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“Smith’s art is one of fundamentals—color, mark, surface—where qualities as slight as the direction of a brushstroke or the pressure of its application yield an outsize pictorial impact. Take Untitled (green) (1978–79), for example, which is comprised of rows of luminous, thinly applied golden green. The terminus of each horizontal mark meets the beginning of the next, creating a brief concentration of saturated color. Repeated across the surface, these points of overlap gather into a drifting vertical column and, in turn, establish the opposing axis of the grid. Rather than imposing a grid upon the picture, Smith allows it to emerge from the accumulation of marks. His art is rigorous without ever becoming systematic.” ―Alex Grimley