If you’ve ever been anywhere near Pepperdine University’s Cultural Arts Center, chances are you’ve run into Pepperdine student and local California artist Brighton Demerest-Smith. Demerest-Smith lives and breathes his art, spending the majority of his time here at Pepperdine holed up in one of the upstairs studios, churning out piece by piece like a machine — but without the mechanically formed, apathetic contrivances that too much of art today seems to robotically insinuate. Demerest-Smith works from his head, paints from his mind and through his hands, trying to express an idea through universally recognized forms of beauty. His paintings almost require an emotional response, whether it be a plein air landscape piece, where forms ebb in and out of abstraction and lucidity, or one of his most recent undertakings: a series of orchids.
If you do find yourself strolling by the CAC and happen to run into Demerest-Smith see if he’ll take you up to the studio and show his works in process. Recently, I was fortunate enough to take a peek inside myself. Upon walking into the studio, it’s not surprising to at first be overwhelmed by the explosion of color and paint that seems to coat the studio like a layer of dust.
Maybe the ghost of Jackson Pollock was working here, one might muse; but then one is immediately confronted with a few of Demerest-Smith’s recent paintings, a series of orchids. Containing the emotional expressivity of a Pollock without all the mess, Demerest-Smith uses what can only be paradoxically deemed “controlled spontaneity” — thick, impasto brush strokes that lend an expressive creativity and an emotionally charged feeling to the work. Sure, they’re images of flowers, each represented in varying formalistic degrees, each highlighting and emphasizing different parts of the vegetation — the silky smooth flatness of the petals, the varying color temperatures contained within a single blossom, the diverse similarities within an entire bunch — but there is something rather expressive to them. Some of the paintings contain almost incised, carved elements. The paint practically leaps off of the canvas, begging the viewer to indulge it with a glance, a comment, a murmur of appreciation for its sculptural qualities.
Through the use of strong, frenetic, painterly gestures, each one unique to the specific work, and though adapted, never entirely repeated, Demerest-Smith manages to capture and convey the integrity of the object depicted, coercing the viewer into doing a double take on nature and its surrounding elements. Of course, as Demerest-Smith has said, art can never compete with nature; it can perhaps only cause you to look harder, look more intently, look differently at an element or aspect of it that you may have never noticed before. It is with this in mind that Demerest-Smith explores his subject, doing highly personal psychological-scientific “experiments” through varied approaches to the subject matter, all the while hoping to discover something new about the flower, and about himself, in the process.
As an artist, Demerest-Smith naturally finds a deeply personal connection with the theme of the orchid — an “obsession,” as he calls it. What strikes him the most, after having studied and observed several different orchids in order to prepare for the painting process, is the beauty of the orchid in sharp contrast with its origins. The stem, the leaves and the roots at the bottom of the plant are all rather displeasing to the eye, if not downright ugly, he explains. It is only the blossom — which separates itself from its low-lying roots by a slender, long stem thrust high into the sky — that represents any beauty. In a sense, Demerest-Smith says, he sees the flower as staying strongly connected to its history, its source, but never fearing to display its stunning attractiveness and its exquisite potential. Thus, through abstracted representation, through artificially realistic beauty, Demerest-Smith promises the viewer more than just a delectable confection, as some of his pastels might suggest. Rather, his works are capable of conveying and expressing a beating heart beneath layers of oil on canvas.
Demerest-Smith was born in Irvine, Calif., in 1991; he has been involved in the arts for several years, painting since he was 12 and attending an all-arts high school in Orange County. Having exhibited in several nationally recognized Southern California art venues, fairs, and galleries, Demerest-Smith’s young career as a Los Angeles artist has already been met with a great degree of success. One of the few young artists to be currently represented in a gallery, many of Demerest-Smith’s works in his current “Orchid” series can be seen on display at Skidmore Contemporary Art Gallery in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station.
