24 pins, 13 pieces of paper and painted elements, 1974
In the 1950s Smith, who trained in Sheffield and at the Royal College of Art, belonged to the 'Kitchen Sink' school of painters who depicted everyday things using a very dour palette of colours. He later gave up this realist approach in favour of an abstract style. In common with his contemporaries throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s Smith began to explore the relationships between colour, sound and movement in a very individual way. For Smith there was a strong link between the rhythm he wished to convey and the idea of musical notation, which itself conveyed rhythm on a flat surface. He came to regard his work as diagrams of his own experiences and sensations, saying, in 1963: the closer the painting is to a diagram or graph the nearer it is to my intention.' Smith's work of the early 1970s, exemplified by this busy, collated relief, is an extension of this belief.
