Ross + Kramer presents David Brian Smith landscapes shaped by memory and rural heritage
Ross + Kramer presents All around the Wrekin, a completed solo exhibition by London-based artist David Brian Smith, whose practice continues to examine landscape as a carrier of memory and lineage.
The presentation focused on new large-scale paintings shaped by the artist’s ongoing interest in English agrarian life and the symbolic language that forms around inherited terrain.
Each work extended his long engagement with pastoral tradition, while emphasizing a contemporary sensibility defined by radiance, precision, and contemplative depth.
David Brian Smith’s upbringing in rural Shropshire remains central to his visual vocabulary. His transition to London for his studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design intensified the distance between past and present, prompting a renewed attention to the fields, farmsteads, and seasonal rhythms that structured his early environment.
The exhibition’s title, drawn from a Midlands phrase meaning “to take the long way around,” served as a fitting metaphor for a practice shaped by return—both literal and imagined—as the artist revisited landscapes held in personal and familial memory.
The canvases, produced on heavily woven herringbone linen as an homage to his family heritage, extended the tactile presence of the work beyond surface imagery.
Their materiality recalled the traditions of the Norwich School while positioning David Brian Smith’s approach within a contemporary register marked by saturated chroma and intricately built scenes.
Figures on horseback traveled through wide fields, animals of unusual palette grazed beneath luminous skies, and distant farmhouses appeared like anchors within shifting horizons.
Each composition presented an English countryside reinterpreted through atmospheric intensity and a sense of suspended time.
David Brian Smith’s technique, relying on layered oil paint combined with gold and silver leaf, generated surfaces that shifted subtly as light moved across them.
Transparent and opaque passages intersected, creating images that felt rooted in recollection yet visually forward.
This interplay offered a landscape not fixed to depiction but shaped by personal mythology, where memory and folklore intertwined in a quiet, hypnotic register.
The artist, born in 1981 in Wolverhampton, has developed a career marked by international exhibitions in Taipei, Mumbai, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Milan, and Hong Kong.
His work has been recognized with the Creekside Open Award in 2013 and the Royal Academy Landscape Painting Award in 2005.
Though the exhibition has concluded, its body of work reaffirms Smith’s commitment to landscape as a site of identity, lineage, and imagined continuity, shaped by both rural origins and urban perspective.
Photography by Ben Deakin for Individual works; Photography by John Lopez for installation shots; all images courtesy of artist and Ross + Kramer Gallery
https://www.davidbriansmith.com
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