Roper Gallery Presents Brandon C. Smith’s Art Exhibit

Sundays through Wednesdays, you will be able to walk in and have your attention demanded by these art pieces, all fairly striking and wild in their overall compilations. Brandon C. Smith is the artist behind these works, a professor at the University of Kentucky as a senior lecturer of art. His pieces are centered around the human form, shockingly realistic replications of mouths stretched to be laughing, screaming, cheering with excitement, all dependent on the eye of the beholder, or mouths yelling in anger as a comment on the current political climate within America.

From his website, brandoncsmith.com, under portfolios, the works in the gallery are under “Outrage” and “Convulsive Motion: Recent Works of the Human Form ”.

“Outrage” is the comment about America’s political climate, having some mouths portrayed in horror and others seem to be elated.

To describe some of his works amongst this portfolio, “Rally” is the perfect painting to match his collection’s description. Within this piece, there are detailed mouths shaped to appear full of despair and opened wider to appear laughing and overjoyed. All of these mouths had no faces, placing no one group to either political side. The mouths’ heads were swirled away, leaving vivid paint strokes in their path. The artist then has a unique style of making paint drips amongst his extremely detailed base layer, dripping dark green and red paint on and amongst the blurred faces and mouths from caricatures. To finish this piece, there is a bold covering of red paint that appears to have been thrown onto the canvas haphazardly and with no plan and still becomes a cohesive element to an image that has such a bold statement attached to it. Another painting will have blurred heads and bodies with mouths stretching away from the crowd of others, trying to escape the mass media hysteria that conquers American culture today. However, there is black paint poured onto the top half of the canvas outlining some of the outstretched forms of heads and arms, pieces of people reaching for more to find there is nothing there.

Smith’s, “Convulsive Motion” collection has all the hard lines that would come with a strong shin, kneecap, and thigh combination, mixed with the gentle paint strokes that would usually leave a delicate feather in its wake, giving a soft strength to many of these works. As described on his website, “the works are somewhere between aggressive expression and delicate sensitivity,” he says he is exploring, “ the space between… the expectations of beauty with the unsettling transition into visual chaos”. These paintings are both relatable yet puzzling as you are looking at the human form, the images you have known the longest, and they are altered in a grand way, making the hard lines blurred and shifting your reality as you peer closer at the minute details of these oil paintings being able to see the layers of paint on the canvas and see the texture that comes with it.

Brandon C. Smith’s art is that of passion and creativity, he has an unpredictable flair to common occurrences in everyday life, shifting your perspective to not always see the expected image.