Artist Lucien Smith Discusses His 'Southampton Suite'

Abstract painter Lucien Smith will discuss “Southampton Suite” — his exhibition of 10 large-scale paintings currently on view at the Parrish Art Museum, with Alicia G. Longwell, Ph.D., the museum’s chief curator. Resuming the museum’s online Friday Nights Live! series, the live-streamed talk on Friday, October 2, at 5 p.m., will be filmed in the gallery in front of Smith’s paintings. The public is invited to join the talk, which can be accessed online only (no onsite audience). Log in information is at parrishart.org.

“I’m delighted to kick off our Friday Nights Live! fall series with Lucien Smith, a dynamic and reflective artist based here on the East End, and welcome him back to the Parrish after working with him as one of the Jurors for the 2019 ‘Artists Choose Artists’ exhibition,” said Corinne Erni, senior curator.

Lucien Smith (b.1989) is best known for his process-based works that employ both accidental and improvisational marks to create loose, all-over compositions. Organized by Alicia Longwell, “Lucien Smith: Southampton Suite” brings the artist’s Rain Paintings series to conclusion with the 10 large-scale paintings created in a plein air studio that he constructed on the East End during the summer of 2013.

With the 9-by-7-foot acrylic on unprimed canvas “Southampton Suite” paintings, the artist created an immersive environment that continues his quest to “… replicate a natural process with man made tools.”

The 10 works on view are from 2013 and have never been shown as a group.

As an artist who grounds his work in the historical context of making art, Smith was inspired by Julian Schnabel’s open-air studio, Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings, and Hans Hartung’s use of a garden sprayer to apply paint. Smith’s paintings, made by filling an empty fire extinguisher with paint and spraying the canvas, became widely known soon after his 2011 graduation from Cooper Union.

The artist was attracted to the process of replicating a natural process — rain — with a manmade tool. For the first Rain Paintings series, Murmur of the Heart, Smith used blue and yellow paint. After this initial investigation he began to use a monochromatic approach, taking a cue from the traditional depiction of rain in Japanese woodblock prints.