Two distinctive art collections by Hedley Smyth
Urban Atmosphere
A collection of mixed media art pieces capturing the life of urban spaces.
Rural Landscapes
A collection of paintings capturing the space-time continuum of rural scenes.
Urban Atmosphere
This series is based upon city and urban locations, where the atmosphere and life are portrayed in layers to suggest structure and distance. The few artefacts, such as street objects in space also reference time, while people or moving objects give a prevailing sense of perceived place as made and experienced by people living and working in the city.
Numerous cities are represented, including across London, Times Square in New York, the Toronto skyline and Eastern urban scenes. I have a long and deep seated attachment to urban environments and how they both change and are sustained.
Rural Landscapes
This series captures rural scenes that have influenced me, especially the north Norfolk coast. These are less abstract but many tend towards a sparse depiction and also employ oil, acrylic and commercial paints. The sparse marks contrast with the intensity of the structure and marks of my urban work.
While atmosphere also arises in some of these works, they are not a central theme of these rural scenes. Distance forms a dominant theme in many of them, which is more deliberately trying to capture a sense of time and timelessness – a space-time continuum is this rural work that also less overtly is present in some of the urban work too.
