John Holt Smith

Gallery Affiliations: William Campbell Contemporary Art, Runyon Fine Arts, A. Beadles Fine Art

Region: West

The Oculus paintings are an extension of my previous body of work, the Sequence paintings. In this process, I take a cross-section from a photograph of an eye or a flower and stretch it on the computer until the image becomes a vertical sequence of all the colors of the source image. I then use a program to rotate that color sequence so that the lines of color become perfectly concentric. Thus the eye or flower is ‘simplified’ and reduced to a ‘perfect form’ from a small fraction of the whole. At this point, I use the image as a reference to make the painting. All paintings are airbrushed with acrylic enamel paint on aluminum panels and are perfectly color accurate to their source.