Artist Statement

"I am able to paint exactly what I see, without conscious effort. I'm referring to the physical world and to my imagination, some big territory. I have had wonderful feedback from clients and collectors. It has helped me paint more consistently from my heart. I have a wide range of inspirations and appreciate that each demands a different approach. This excites me as I feel my way through each painting, realistic or abstract. The more I paint, the more inspiration comes, and the more I want to paint.

I find more confidence with each painting I complete. New ideas, new challenges motivate me. I feel like I am just beginning to paint, and I want always to feel that way. Life is a teacher, the paint is a teacher. Neither ever quits, if there is a willing student. Learning is such a rush. Who would ever want to stop?

The greatest satisfaction comes when clients want my paintings in their collections. If my paintings bring positive energy and emotion to a collector's environment, I am so grateful to have that effect through my work. My work is optimistic. It's an honor to share it with others. It just doesn't get better than that.

I struggle to live in the moment and appreciate everything that is happening. I can't imagine expressing that any other way than painting. If I haven't already, I hope that someday I have the privilege of sharing a painting with you."




About the Artist

Brad Smith's arrival in Santa Fe at the start of the present century was auspicious for every area of his life. Working as a professional musician at the time, he was bunking between gigs at the Colorado ranch of singer/composer Gary Morris. While playing the Opera House concert arranged by Elizabeth and Randy Travis to benefit victims of the devastating Los Alamos fire, Brad met William Vincent, a prominent and widely appreciated painter and gallery owner. Brad later showed Vincent some of his work and was invited on the spot to show at the William Vincent Gallery. Vincent saw the very qualities of confidence, maturity, and aesthetic integrity in all Smith's paintings that make great artistic music in Smith's paintings today. Smith's paintings sold briskly from the start, allowing him to move to Santa Fe, where he painted his way up from newcomer to having his own studio/gallery and being able to show the full range of his work in a great location. Smith's studio is in his gallery, and after a year in a smaller space across the street, Smith has recently moved to a larger, higher visibility location at 714 Canyon Road, right in the heart of this legendary street. On display are the oil and acrylic paintings for which he his best known, with an exciting new addition, works in another medium he has mastered, watercolor. Proximity to the Santa Fe River lends a woodsy and park-like feeling to the creative energy of Canyon Road. Adobe walls and wood floors contribute to an invitingly informal ambience, making this gallery a magnet for art lovers new to Brad Smith's work and an easy find for collectors who have followed the artist up a ladder of fine galleries in Dallas and Santa Fe.

From his earliest memories of childhood forward, Smith has needed no persuasion to acquaint himself intimately with piano, percussion, and art. Smith's lifelong compulsion to make music, to draw, to paint, and to relish every kind of learning, bears exquisite fruit in the paintings he creates today. Smith developed a referral clientele and gallery following in Dallas in the 80's, doing portraits and murals. He worked in a disciplined palette that gave a certain austerely formal gravitas to his portraits of the women of Dallas. He tempered this with contemporary stylistic riffs and with exquisite skin tones and facial expressions and poses that reveal personality, and character. In family and couples portraiture, the artist seems to have given in to a longing for more light and color, for the expression of lighter mood. That readiness to burst into an artist's wonderland of color found fulfillment only after Smith moved to Santa Fe in 2000. His creative spirit and his palette opened up completely to the enticements of pure and luscious chroma. Color has been a signature element in Smith's paintings ever since, vivid, alive, skillfully orchestrated to work harmoniously in splendid variety. Smith arranges shapes, forms, colors, and textures, with a surety of eye and hand that suggest extensive education and experience in both studio art and art history, but his formal education stopped after high school. The artist's ability to make a beautiful surface, and then transcend it in figuratives and portraiture is partly natural and partly the result of self-directed learning, observation, experimentation, and practice, all in passionate mode. Smith's compositions have music in them, balanced, nuanced, rhythmic and flowing here, staccato and syncopated there. Smith paints what is visible and suggests with finesse, delicacy, and sensitivity what is not.

Motivated by the urge to cultivate, to make things grow, Smith includes plants and flowers in settings and as subjects. Other themes that come up in Smith's work are the rodeo, ethnography, and the landscape. He has developed an equally wide range of artistic approaches, each tailored uniquely to the needs of the particular subject. Smith paints in three mediums, acrylic, oil, and watercolor, the last of which has its own expressive power and has added personal meaning for the artist. "I can't describe exactly why, but I like to use all three mediums for different reasons. Muted colors seem richer in oil; for a brighter palette, I like acrylic. I have always loved watercolor, the medium my grandfather taught me, for its unique set of properties and possibilities." says Smith. More than half Smith's paintings are of women-elegant, at ease, naturally graceful, naturally beautiful in their exquisite variety and in the exquisite settings Smith conjures for them. Patterns and colors relate to each other in opposition and harmony in all of Smith's paintings, just as they do in the lives of the subjects Smith explores. Smith's gallery encompasses contemporary romanticism and abstract expressionism side by side, differentiated by degree of abstraction, united by compositional and technical brilliance. It's easy to see why Smith's paintings resonate with an ever-widening field of collectors.

Enjoy this website. If you have any questions, want to make a purchase, or are ready to get Brad Smith started on that commission you've been dreaming about, e-mail or call us. When you come to Santa Fe, don't miss Canyon Road, be sure to visit Smith Oba Fine Art. There's live music in the courtyard on Fridays in the warm months. Light light, warmth and color in the cool months round out four seasons of original art, presented well. You'll enjoy the comfortable ambience created by a professional but easygoing and down-to earth master painter, Brad Smith, and his lovely partner Sachi Oba. And be forewarned, the paintings are even harder to resist in person.