Geoffrey Todd Smith’s abstract drawings mix beauty and danger in equal measure, enticing viewers into fields of beautiful psychedelic patterning only to reveal wickedly spiked and thorny shapes. As viewers, we recall the moments when we began asking questions like: Why are my parents inspecting my Halloween candy? What was that high school boy in the Ace Frehley t-shirt distributing on the playground if not stickers? Influenced by nature documentaries on gorgeous carnivorous plants, great white sharks, and razor-sharp coral reefs, these colorful and trippy hand-made drawings are both seductive and threatening.
Smith uses a series of small geometric shapes to form fields of brightly colored images drawn with gel pens on a variety of colored papers, often including collaged elements or shapes painted in gouache. This limited vocabulary of mark-making presents a range of images that evoke a mood of sentimentality for activities of his youth: jigsaw puzzles, video games, sticker collections, and doodling as well as his youthful fascination with simple geometry and one-point perspective.
A key drawing in the show, “Please Don’t Lick the Pollock,” was inspired by a story Geoffrey was told about a girl who had the odd desire to lick a Jackson Pollock painting on a trip to a Washington D.C. museum, a story that made him want to arouse a visceral response to the viewing of his work. Hence, Geoffrey Todd Smith will reward the patient viewer by turning them on!
In 2007 Geoffrey Todd Smith was included in “The Uncertainty Principle: Drawing in the Golden Age of Worry” at the Northern Illinois University Art Museum and in “Obsessive-Explosive” at the Evanston Art Center in Illinois. Recent shows include a solo at ButcherShopDogmatic in Chicago and group shows at Telephone Booth in Kansas City, Mixture Contemporary in Houston and SUNY-Purchase in New York Smith has work in the collections of Hallmark Cards, Inc. in Kansas City, the South Bend Regional Art Museum and Harper College in Illinois. He was featured in the April 2007 issue of Chicago Magazine as one of Chicago’s “rising stars we should be collecting now” and his work has been written about in artinfo.com. Smith lives and works in Chicago.