Lucien Smith

OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

This work is excellent condition. The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. With some of the blues tending more towards a softer turquoise.
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In the past three years, 25-year old Lucien Smith has exploded as an international art world darling, creating an instantly recognizable body of work anchored by his highly sought after Rain Paintings, the series to which Forces of Nature belongs. Smith began his career as a member of the Still House Group, an artist-run organization institutionalized by the success of Louis Eisner, Nick Darmstaeder and Brendan Lynch. In the fall of 2011, Smith relocated his studio to Claverack, a rural town in Upstate New York, where he embarked on the creation of his Rain Paintings. Smith felt compelled that the tranquility and isolation of the country setting could bring these paintings to life, and so the title of Forces of Nature of the present work is very symbolic for the artist. This return to nature sparked a heightened sense of emotion and introspection for Smith who stated “I wanted to take some of the emotional experiences I was going through and dumb them down…Making a joke of it was my way of dealing with what I was going through. When I was looking through comics, I’d run across the same image of characters trapped in the rain. It’s like a universal symbolic image of being sad and alone” (Lucien Smith in conversation with Bill Powers, “Lucien Smith,” Purple Magazine, Spring/Summer 2012, Issue 17).

Searching for simplicity in his rural surroundings, Smith began to champion the process through which his work could be materialized. To create the Rain Paintings, Smith used a paint filled fire extinguisher, from which the shower of drips of paint literally seeped into the unprimed canvas. Smith’s rain-covered canvases are carefully orchestrated in their execution, as the exploding drips are directed by the artist’s intent and hand. Yet, due to the nature of how these paintings are made, Smith also had to embrace the accidental and chance markings as well. The final creation becomes a stunning composition directed by control as well as elements of chance, perfectly capturing Smith’s creative performance. Thus, the Rain Paintings spark dialogue between the artist and yield, as well as the performance process and spontaneous expression. The introduction of chance into Smith’s painting process draws logical comparisons to Jackson Pollock’s energetic drip paintings and Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings; the Rain Paintings thus being rooted in Pop as well as Abstract Expressionism, while at the same time speaking to performance art and Impressionism. For Smith, he prizes his process above all, emphasizing that “[the] way to avoid that dangerous territory is to have the language and ideas, those tools, which come before what the final piece is going to look like” (Lucien Smith quoted in Christopher Bollen, ‘Lucien Smith’, Interview Magazine, October 2013). The seemingly effortless culmination of Smith’s calculated process, Forces of Nature is a profoundly spiritual work which forces the viewer into deep contemplation. Comprised of an awe-inspiring network of pure blues and yellows oscillating between various levels of density, Forces of Nature achieves Lucien Smith’s desire for absolute transformation within his work. “I wanted to create a surface which gave the viewer a portal into an animated world, taking the gesture of a rain drop and conveying it through a simple action” (Lucien Smith in conversation with James Oliver for Post New, www.post-new.com/#feature=node/333).