Artist Statement
The core of my practice is figurative painting. Collaboration, curating, teaching and travelling have allowed film, installation, performance, print and drawing to inspire its changes.
Painting for me can be both refined and raw, quiet and raucous. It connects personal experiences with the influences of art history. The central theme of my work is my family, an ever-evolving set of relationships in which emotion, desire and identity are tangible, fluid and vivid.
I collate scrapbooks in which friends, family and heroes montage with ancient art alongside film stills, creatures and landscapes from my travels. These collections of collaged, dreamlike, juxtaposed memories often form the basis of my paintings.
Im currently working on paintings of influential figures in my life for ongoing series called ‘Descendants’. I choose to paint these individuals as they convey the resilience, empathy and vulnerability that arise from their experiences of trauma and solace. They form a collective portrait based on the ancestries we all resist or embrace.
Figurative painting naturally seems to transform and subvert the image of ourselves. By replacing or stripping away cultural and psychological references this group of seemingly disparate, individual portraits evolve towards a cohesive palette and sense of ‘touch’. Passages arise from poured washes and pigment properties, some are repeatedly scratched, and others become open simplified forms.
I find as singular images they emerge more layered and unique for me from this collective process and veer between the veneration and iconoclasm of portraiture painting.
Im now preparing the studio to make an expansive frieze of Painting’s that develop the ‘Force Majeure’ series on homepage. Where figures will mutate from parents to actors to mammals and topographies become floral pattern or animal skins.
See Studio in About and homepage for series of images on my practice.
Bio
Jesse Leroy Smith lives and works in Brighton and Cornwall and was born in London 1966. He studied Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and a Postgraduate Diploma in Painting at the Royal Academy Schools in 1992.
He exhibits internationally in commercial and public galleries, art fairs, and travels widely for art residencies and research. In early 2020 he worked towards a solo show at Weserhalle Gallery in Berlin whilst on a residency there.
He also curate’s art projects in public sites and abandoned buildings that bring together established artists with graduates, students and communities to reimagine these venues and their future use. In 2016 a commission from Cornish Mining World Heritage Sites with artist Bernard Irwin led to a series of multi media public performances and a suite of copper etchings to commemorate the mining legacy in the South West. Funding from Arts Council England facilitated the production of paintings made in response to this extensive research and collaboration.
In 2019 he staged the solo show ‘Force Majeure’ at Tremenheere sculpture gallery and gardens in Penzance and concluded it with ‘Sol Force’ for the summer solstice, a curated event with over 50 artists in aid of ‘Freedom from Torture’.
He is currently working towards the curated project ‘Unstable Monuments’ in Bristol with international artists and young local creatives and a two month residency in Crete, both in 2021.
