Dave Smith (born 1944, Derbyshire, England) studied at
Derby College of Art, initially taking commercial design courses before
specializing in painting and subsequently becoming a post graduate fine arts
student at Hornsey College of Art in London. In 1969 he co-founded a design collaboration with
3 other artists, the London-based Electric Colour Company.
In 1973, Smith took up an art teaching position in The
Bahamas. Once in Nassau, he started a series of small
pencil drawings with incongruous juxtapositions that he later developed into
larger paintings. His ‘Pop-Realist’
style contrasted imported artifacts, such as American cars from the 1950s and
60s, with ethnic and often idealized Bahamian landscapes. He worked with themes such as security screens
erected around the island, postcards and African and devotional artifacts. Smith
explains, “The focus of my work revolves around themes which are essentially
perennial. Our problematic interaction with social issues like crime, religion and consumerism remain with us – as does the sometime incongruous reality of
our idyllic, post card shoreline.”
Smith held his first solo exhibition of this work in
Nassau in 1981, and in 1984 had his first USA solo exhibition in Miami, Florida.
Six subsequent shows followed in Nassau,
culminating with a ten-year survey of his work at the College of The Bahamas in
1990.
In 1991, he left The Bahamas for California, initially
painting billboards for the recording industry. Gravitating to the many scenery
shops around the city, he joined Local
816 (Scenic Artists Union) and has worked for the last several years at NBC
TV Studios in Burbank, California.
Smith's work has been shown in many solo and group
exhibitions. In 2008, a concise
retrospective of 15 signature paintings from the 1970's and 1980's was held at
the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (Dave
Smith - Twist of Fate). In 2011,
Popopstudios organized Marquees, an
exhibition of Smith's large format photographs of Nassau movie theatre
marquees, and simultaneously, the Central Bank hosted Nassau Revisited, a series of new paintings. He has also shown at the Sunyata Gallery in
San Pedro, California and Crossing Gallery in Los Angeles.
Dave Smith was one of the
11 artists featured in the widely acclaimed 2008 documentary film, ‘Artists of
The Bahamas’.