PAINTER · CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA

Order
held against
the storm.

Figurative oil painting that begins in chaos and ends in proportion. A figure held against turmoil, built through drawing, oil glaze, and frames made in the studio.

OIL · MIXED MEDIUMEST. STUDIO 2022

STUDIO, CHARLOTTESVILLE

Recent works

2023 — 2025

A painter’s journey

Justin Smith is a painter and conceptual artist in Charlottesville, Virginia. Raised on a cattle farm by a sculptor father and a photographer mother, he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles, where he was commissioned to reproduce Renaissance masters and paint trompe-l’oeil furniture and murals.

In 1993 he was the first resident guest artist at Kunsthaus Rhenania in Cologne. He painted en plein air between St-Rémy and Avignon, worked as an artisan outside Geneva, and later as a journeyman carpenter. At Hunter College he earned a BA in English writing and a BFA in painting.

In Charlottesville he restored the historic Rock Store in Woods Mill and opened ebb&flow, a curiosity shop and gallery. In 2022 he closed the shop and returned to painting full time. The habits of numismatics — condition, provenance, the weight of an object — run through the work.

ARTIST STATEMENT · 2025

The work is rooted in classical painting traditions, figurative drawing, oil technique, and Renaissance proportion — affirming that beauty and order remain vital in an era that often embraces their opposites. The subject is the human form proportioned against chaos, confronting truth, desire, and consequence. The aim is not merely to provoke, but to show that the rightly proportioned, rightly oriented human form can reflect divine intention and endure the storm.

JUSTIN TODD SMITH · CHARLOTTESVILLE

STUDIO