A Painter’s Journey

Justin Smith is a painter and conceptual artist in Charlottesville, Virginia. His work begins in chaos and ends in proportion: a figure held against turmoil, built through drawing, oil glaze, and frames he makes himself.

He was raised on a cattle farm by a sculptor father and a photographer mother. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, then at the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles, where he was commissioned to reproduce Renaissance masters and to paint trompe-l’oeil furniture and murals for dealers and retailers. In 1993 he was the first resident guest artist at Kunsthaus Rhenania in Cologne, and helped demolish and rebuild the Tower Gallery. There he left old technique behind and began working from risk rather than finish.

In Europe he painted en plein air at l’atelier de La Gardy, between St-Rémy and Avignon, and sold work to travelers. Outside Geneva he continued as an artisan, painting furniture while learning conceptual design through carpentry and masonry. Back in the States in 1996, he worked as a journeyman carpenter in Raleigh and made a small group of double-sided paintings in reversible frames. Several sold to private collections and paid the return to New York.

“Either you make New York work for you, or you end up working for New York.” He took the second path for a decade: bars, sales for a private REIT, and, at Hunter College, a BA in English writing and a BFA in painting. He painted rarely and almost never showed. Burned out, he left.

In Charlottesville he restored the historic Rock Store in Woods Mill, between Lynchburg and Charlottesville, and in 2013 opened ebb&flow, a curiosity shop and gallery for local artists and artisans. Along the way he had taken best-in-show and honorable mentions in Connecticut, Cologne, Raleigh, and New York. He had been art editor of The Carillon at Canterbury School, and sole juror of ARTEL’s 26th Cinco Banderas Expo in Pensacola. In 2022 he closed the shop and returned to painting full time.

He is also an avid numismatist. The habits of that pursuit — condition, provenance, economies, the weight of an object — run through the work.