British artist David Brian Smith transforms traditional landscape painting into extraordinary visions filled with vibrant patterns, luminous colors, and otherworldly beauty. His latest solo exhibition, "All around the Wrekin," showcases pastoral scenes that combine Easter egg-like clouds, glowing sunrise gradients, and countless intricate patterns across large-scale canvases. The exhibition is currently on display at Ross Kramer Gallery in San Francisco through November 22.
Smith's artistic vision draws heavily from his upbringing in rural Shropshire, England, where his ancestral connections to the region's agricultural traditions profoundly influenced his work after relocating to London. His paintings evoke the spirit of British landscape painting, particularly reminiscent of the Norwich School of painters, a group of self-taught, working-class artists who formed an art society in the early 19th century. The exhibition's title references the Wrekin, a distinctively conical-shaped hill in Shropshire that serves as a popular walking destination.
"Smith departs from historically more academic styles of oil painting to create works re-envisioned through a hallucinatory, technicolor lens," according to Ross Kramer Gallery. His approach creates starkly contrasted rolling hills, farm buildings, and bulbous trees that also evoke the bucolic yet faintly uncanny paintings of American Regionalist artist Grant Wood (1891-1942). The gallery describes his work as "rooted in the English pastoral tradition yet boldly contemporary in vision."
The technical complexity of Smith's paintings becomes evident in the intricate details that cover every surface. Within skies, fields, rivers, and forests, hundreds of small hatch marks, flowers, starbursts, and other thematic motifs dance across the canvas. He frequently incorporates gold and silver leaf to add even greater ethereality to his large-scale, luminous works, utilizing the power of color and light to evoke both nostalgia and a kind of psychedelic utopianism.
The exhibition features several major works, including "And nature smiled" (2025), an oil painting on herringbone linen measuring 66 7/8 x 55 1/8 inches, and "All around the Wrekin" (2025), oil on linen at 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 inches. Other notable pieces include "Jackfield" (2025), combining oil and gold leaf on herringbone linen, "A Dragon's Eye" (2025), also featuring oil and gold leaf, and "A place of my heart" (2025), oil on linen. All photographs of the works are credited to Ben Deakin.
Beyond the San Francisco exhibition, Smith's work is gaining international recognition through his participation in "Inner and Outer Worlds," an exhibition of international contemporary painting currently running through April 12 at the Ju Ming Museum in Taiwan. The gallery notes that Smith's paintings "explore ideas of place, belonging, and time through radiant color, intricate brushwork, and layered symbolism," positioning him as a significant voice in contemporary landscape painting who successfully bridges traditional pastoral themes with bold, modern artistic vision.
