All are invited to meet our next artist, David Orrin Smith, at an Artist Reception on Sunday, January 19. Refreshments will be served.

Smith has been drawing and painting his entire life. His current focus is plein air watercolor landscapes, graphite portraiture, as well as a variety of other media, subjects and scale. This exhibit will feature a number of his newer pieces. The exhibit will hang from January 19–February 28, 2025. 

Smith loves the immediacy of painting en plein air, outside, from life, to share the stories of atmosphere, mood, light of day, the specificity of place and time. As he explains, “The making of a plein air landscape watercolor painting is coupled to the actual lived time spent observing the landscape change, and cannot be thematically separated from the image—the image is an expression of many moments, of a passage of time, not the camera’s single instant."

Smith began his study of art at the Seattle Academy of Fine Art (now Gage) under the mentorship of Gary Faigin and Tony Ryder. He studied art at Dartmouth College, and then received his Master’s at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. After spending time in Santa Fe, he returned to his home city of Seattle in the fall of 2021. Smith has embraced a lifestyle of sharing the artwork he makes with new audiences in new places through Plein Air festivals. He believes that this allows viewers to better value where they are, and gives people a chance to connect with original artwork made in real time as they watch. “Yes,” he says, “The outcomes are paintings, but the process is performance art, public art.”

To learn more about Smith and his work, visit his website at davidosmithartist.com.