Woman with hat

Education in the 50-‘s could not grip the attention of Herman Smith (Utrecht, 1948). He hides his earliest ‘art works’ under his school books and keeps them carefully under cover. Thus he survives the standards of his time. At the age of 15 he lands up in an office, where three years later his head discovers piles of drawings in a desk drawer. He puts him on the spot: to make promotion or attend an art academy. That marks the change in his life. He goes to Artibus in Utrecht and subsequently is admitted to the State Academy of Amsterdam. Also in Leuven, Belgium, he attends lectures of philosophy about the phenomenology of nature.

In 1997 there is a great shift in his existence. During a removal of his atelier he is hit by a stroke. The ‘Treebuds-series’ on which he works is roughly interrupted, and he is forced to represent that which he experiences. This results in a series of very special paintings and the book ‘A peculiar trip, the strike as seen from the inside’. In this book he relates, at the hand of his paintings, how he had to learn everything once more, like a child, but also that the most common daily manoeuvres got a higher meaning for him. The images he saw helped him to refind time, space and himself.

Herman Smith works in themes. That which affects him he recreates into paintings, be it the land consolidation of mr. Mansholt, the cows without horns or the waving corn fields of the isle of Texel. The pencil drawing ‘Woman with hat’ is one of a large series of nude studies.