British artist Steve Smythe works at the cutting edge of contemporary street art, blending the boundaries between the concrete canvas and the printed form to create a novel aesthetic for the twenty-first century. Inspired by Nouveau Realism, decollage, and artists such as Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains, Smythe incorporates a plethora of methods and materials into his process. Using collage, screen printing, spray paint, and mixed media, Smythe captures the sense of the city, each work recalling the deteriorating paste-ups that adorn hidden back streets and crumbling buildings. The generative possibilities of decay and entropy suffuse Smythe’s work as each print asks us to consider where creation ends and demise begins. Typically, Smythe’s screen prints and originals combine iconic figurative imagery with torn scraps of text in a variety of fonts and styles. Deeply sensitive to colour and compositional technique, each piece is visually powerful, bringing Pop into aesthetic union with Street for a trial blazing style. No two of Smythe’s prints are the same: even in editions, Smythe works to add hand finished details that set every piece apart. Smythe has a degree in Product Design and a teaching degree from Cambridge University, though his artistic process is self taught: an important feature of his practice, which offers the freedom to work without boundaries, without briefs, and with constraints, to imagine the unimaginable and create the truly creative.
British artist Steve Smythe works at the cutting edge of contemporary street art, blending the boundaries between the concrete canvas and the printed form to create a novel aesthetic for the twenty-first century. Inspired by Nouveau Realism, decollage, and artists such as Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains, Smythe incorporates a plethora of methods and materials into his process. Using collage, screen printing, spray paint, and mixed media, Smythe captures the sense of the city, each work recalling the deteriorating paste-ups that adorn hidden back streets and crumbling buildings. The generative possibilities of decay and entropy suffuse Smythe’s work as each print asks us to consider where creation ends and demise begins. Typically, Smythe’s screen prints and originals combine iconic figurative imagery with torn scraps of text in a variety of fonts and styles. Deeply sensitive to colour and compositional technique, each piece is visually powerful, bringing Pop into aesthetic union with Street for a trial blazing style. No two of Smythe’s prints are the same: even in editions, Smythe works to add hand finished details that set every piece apart. Smythe has a degree in Product Design and a teaching degree from Cambridge University, though his artistic process is self taught: an important feature of his practice, which offers the freedom to work without boundaries, without briefs, and with constraints, to imagine the unimaginable and create the truly creative.
