Gary Ernest Smith, Looking West, oil, 40 x 48.
In the summer of 2019, Gary Ernest Smith was driving through Star Valley, WY, four hours north of his home near Salt Lake City. “I stopped at a place there and saw a man in a western outfit standing by his big red barn, and above his head was a huge, very dark cloud,” he recalls. “That moment and the relationship of those images” compelled him to take reference photos for an oil painting that became LOOKING WEST. “I never know for sure how an idea will develop,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a sketch or a memory or flashback. What I enjoy most is piecing a concept together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle.”
Smith has long been known for his eloquently pared-down depictions of the present-day West: rural men and women, their faces obscured; vast farmlands with a few buildings dotting distant horizons; rocky desertscapes, cropped and reduced to breathtakingly stark geometries. “I’ve always looked for different viewpoints or perspectives,” he explains.
Gary Ernest Smith, Sunburnt Field, oil, 36 x 40.
For more than 30 years, Smith was exclusively represented by a gallery that unexpectedly closed its doors in 2015. In the process of signing with six new galleries, he unexpectedly found new creative freedom. “I’m following my own instincts and painting the things around me that inspire me,” he says. He plans to paint some canvases as large as 8 by 10 feet, for example, and recent spectacular winter sunsets are leading him to make them “the focal point of a painting, with the landscape just a thin strip at the bottom.” Smith finds great satisfaction in the results. “The most pure art leads artists into all kinds of places commercialism can never take them.”
Smith is represented by Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Bonner David Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, and New York, NY; Meyer Gallery, Park City, UT; Illume Gallery, St. George, UT; www.foursquareart.com; and Anne Jesperson Fine Art, Helper, UT. –Norman Kolpas