Crowell's Fine Art Gallery
382 Acushnet Avenue
New Bedford, Massachusetts
Through September 19
As a student of Hans Hofmann while attending high school in
New York City and subsequently during his early years at Bard
College, David Loeffler Smith learned respect for and absorbed
his teacher’s notion of the “well-made picture,” whether realist
or abstract.
Now in his 80s, and still actively
making art, Smith is showing recent
work in New Bedford, which had
been his home for many years as
an educator at The Swain School of
Design.
Smith was much more than a teacher,
however. As head of the painting
department at Swain, he championed
the school’s evolution to become
a school of fine arts, rather than a
specialist in design. His influence
on his students was enormous, just
as Hofmann’s had been on the young
Smith. At one point, the faculty
of the Parsons School in New York
was predominantly composed of
graduates from the Swain School,
according to former Swain student
and teacher, Severin Haines,
who currently heads the painting
department of UMass Dartmouth.
Many of Smith’s students have
continued to paint and, stylistically,
several are related to the tenets
of their teacher and mentor. This
phenomenon isn’t unusual, given
Smith’s strengths and influence
as an educator. It does lead one
to conclude there is a burgeoning
“school of painting” that has
developed and is evolving.
For many years, Smith has made
small oil paintings on paper that are then mounted on canvas. This
exhibit of recent work at Crowell’s
Fine Art continues the practice
with 31 examples, all created over
the past three years. Employing a
full color palette, these paintings
rely on spontaneity of brushwork
that energizes each picture with
exuberant vitality. And though
abstract, each relies on a visual
reality referenced in each title from
which it takes inspiration. Many are
based on outside views from Smith’s
studio window.
One can still discern the Hofmann
influence lurking in the brushwork
of Smith’s current paintings,
and even more so that of Arshile
Gorky, but then Smith’s formative
years as an artist occurred at the
time Abstract Expressionism and
European Modernism were linked
together in a powerful trend-setting
bond in American painting. Smith
retreated for a time to a more
figurative exploration in the 1970s,
but his fluid and restlessly animated
brushwork persisted in activating
and imbuing his figures as nonrealist.
While figures appear occasionally in
this series, landscapes predominate.
But in either case, these are paintings
with densely complex compositions
that include incidents of telescoping
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