JEREMY SMITH

I first saw the work of Jeremy Smith in what I consider to be the ideal condition for experiencing art - in the house of my friend, George Thomson. This was a commanding large drawing of a woman in a bathtub - one of the timeless themes of artists. Later I saw in the same house another large drawing of a standing male nude.

 

Marianne Moore once defined art as that which cannot be regarded with detachment; these works seem to have that quality. They are, of course, the products of a highly developed and disciplined mind and hand. (In an earlier era "Mens et Manus" was chosen as the mottos of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Later, in Mira Godard's gallery, I saw a Jeremy Smith of a passenger in a commercial airliner. We have all had this experience. I have sometimes thought: this (flying) must mean something, must have some deep (perhaps unconscious) significance; there must be some way to express this so that the person seeing the work will be engaged (not detached) by the image's encapsulating of a human experience. Jeremy Smith has done this.

Alex Colville, 1988