Paul Anthony Smith Walls Without Borders

Paul Anthony Smith’s oil-on-canvas paintings and unique picotages on pigment print explore the artist’s autobiography, as well as issues of identity and the African Diaspora. Struck by the almost invisible airport workers during a visit to his native Jamaica, Smith painted large- and small-scale compositions that depict these anonymous figures, rendered simply and boldly in order to invest them with dignity and poise. In his picotage images, which Smith creates using a ceramic tool to pick away at the surface material of photographic prints—obscuring or altering his subjects’ face and skin and alluding to tribal masks and scarification—he achieves textures whose surfaces appear almost iridescent.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website