Howard Smith’s Accumulative Practice Captured by “Marks in Time”

“I’m a mark maker,” he says, pointing out how the spaces between paintings and the time lapsed between each work’s completion allowed him to slow down and assess the relations of such seemingly disparate parts. As for why he paints such tiny pieces, he explains, “I wanted to see how much I could put into the small frame.”

In the larger paintings, Smith is able to create the magic of stunning minimalistic surface tones built atop uneven, tiny marks. These marks come together to create the foundation for a coherent surface. It’s the charm of an inherent contradiction. “I’m interested in things that aren’t certain,” Smith says.

That’s the way it is with color, for example. Smith loves watercolor, a subtle medium, which requires many applications to achieve the desired tone and density. And yet, he works mainly with oil paint and oil pastels. More recently, he has come to love colored pencil—a medium he used to hate. Above all, he has always worked by natural light, seeing it as a material that creates special effects. He allows it to creep through the raw sides of paintings, adding an elusive edge.

Smith was born in Chicago in 1943. He earned a B.A. from Colorado College in 1965 and attended graduate school at Stanford University through 1966.

As a student in art school, he engaged a bit with the figure, cobbling together, with friends, enough money to hire a model. But his real interest, even then, was in materials and spatial relations. He was creative: he worked with dolls to that end.

In the 1980s, he became a member of the Radical Painting movement, which included such Minimalist and post-Minimalist artists as Marcia Hafif, who exhibited Smith at her loft in SoHo.

The group debuted at the Williams College Museum of Art in 1986. The members, who varied in their approaches, ranged from Gunter Umberg and Carmen Gloria Morales to Joseph Marioni and Frederic Thurz, who derived from Milton Resnick.“My interest was in the brushstroke,” says Smith, who made a few paintings consisting simply of a single brushstroke.

Also interesting is that—in keeping with his obsessive eye—for thirty years, Smith was an antiques picker, traveling widely to look at collections. “I even found a Constable drawing,” he says. It’s hanging in his Upstate home in Pine Bush N.Y., where he has the larger one of his two studios.

He also found a small John Singer Sargent painting and some Erich Hempel prints. Being a picker, he says, helped him to support his family. “I got pretty good at it; I wasn’t a snob about it."

As for the future, Smith, who shows with Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, has recently pondered something different—making colored sculptures in steel.