Artist compared to the greats
Halifax-born David Smith is making a name for himself with paintings that remind many of LS Lowry.
HALIFAX-BORN DAVID Smith is making a name for himself with paintings that remind many of LS Lowry.
Take a careful look at some of his more recent works, and you might see a recurring character sheltering somewhere on the canvas
A little figure, observing, and sketching. This is his own personal homage to one Laurence Stephen Lowry, the artist who will forever be known, and celebrated, for his “matchstick men and dogs”.
Lowry’s canvases show life and events in and around Pendlebury and Salford, in Lancashire, where he lived and worked. Only rarely did he venture very far from the area and the people that he knew.
And David Smith feels very much the same about his own neck of the woods, which happens to be Halifax and Huddersfield.
David was actually born in Glasgow, and moved to Yorkshire with his family when he was six years old.
“It was when the National Coal Board was consolidating all their pits in this region and in Durham,” he recalls.
His mother was always sketching and doodling and it turned out he, too, showed early artistic promise. At the age of seven he produced a canvas of a country view near his home. He took the painting up the hill to the farmhouse, and dodged the barking dogs in the yard.
“I don’t know where I got the courage to knock on the door”, he laughs, “my legs were shaking, but that’s what I did. And I showed the farmer what I’d done and he said that he liked it. Better, he asked how much I wanted for it!”
That early work changed hands for the princely sum of £5. “I was as pleased as Punch,” he says, “and I took the fiver back down the hill, I remember I skipped down most of it, and to my mum. I even offered it to her, but she refused it, and told me that I should keep it as a reward for my efforts. It was a small fortune, back then, far far more than any pocket money that I got.”
You can only wonder if the farmer kept his artwork and where it might be today – and if the current owners know that it might well be worth a bob or two.
David went to Halifax School of Art, where he developed a love of design and typography, and then into the advertising industry, working for several leading agencies in Leeds. He met and married Mary, and the couple still live in Halifax.
Having made his way up the corporate ladder, he reached a point where he realised he wasn’t doing what he wanted to do, which was draw and paint.
“One day – I remember it so clearly, it was April, 2004 – I just thought ‘it’s now or never.’ So I closed up my laptop, gave the company car keys back, and left. That was it.”
He has spent the years honing his craft and slowly building a name for himself. At the moment he is working (mainly) in acrylics, but is constantly shifting and moving on. He works from home, and chuckles a lot when he’s asked if he’d call it a “studio”. He says: “That would be a bit pompous, I think. It’s what I’d call the old box room, and I always seem to have about three canvases ‘on the go’. I switch from one to another. I’m a pretty disciplined worker and I love being busy. If I’m not there with a brush in my hand, then I’m out collecting material for the next painting to do. I don’t walk around with a drawing pad or a camera in my pocket, it is all in my mind’s eye. ” he says.
For David, his work is about
I believe that my own work gives a very respectful nod to the work of Lowry
One day – I remember it so clearly, it was April, 2004 – I just thought ‘it’s now or never.’
‘memories rekindled’. “There’s more to it than just looking, somehow – back come the smells, the colours, the movement. And if my work brings that sense of involvement to others, then that makes me very happy.”
People often comment on his likeness to Lowry. “Lowry casts his great shadow over all things Northern, and I believe my own work gives a respectful nod to the work of that great man. I am not trying to be him. Not at all.”
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