Chris Smith

Born in 1949 in Yorkshire, Chris Smith began painting and drawing as a child - always landscapes, or historical buildings within the landscape. At sixteen he went to Leeds College of Art and completed his pre diploma year, but having been guided towards commercial graphics rather than fine art, decided not to continue. A friend introduced him to the the Isles of Scilly on a summer job, and the next decade was spent mostly travelling as an itinerant worker between Scilly and Europe. He adopted watercolour as his medium, often financing his travels from the sale of his work. The end of the seventies found him back in Leeds, working as a gardener and attending art classes through the Workers Educational Association. Here he pursued painterly, semi abstract landscapes and life studies under the guidance of tutors from the College of Art. In 1980 he decided to return to Scilly permanently, and by 1986 had established his studio/gallery in a converted barn loft in Old Town, St Marys. He continued until 1996 primarily as a watercolourist, returning occasionally to oil and pastel. In that year, he expanded the premises, gaining a large, separate studio workshop downstairs. The freedom of the new space led to further development in different media, and for the next few years he concentrated almost solely on pastel work and almost exclusively on the shoreline and its tidal aspects as the subject. Although these paintings are seascapes of the islands it is the nuances of the water surface that interest him, the fact that the character of this surface is borrowed from the sky and landscape (reflection or refraction) and the way these qualities vary with the changing light.