Artofsmart is the website belonging to Julian Smart

Resume

My career started with four years at art college studying photography and art- three years at The Mid-Cheshire College of Art and Design and a further year at Plymouth College of Art and Design. I left the latter without completing the course.

Moving to Liverpool, I found work first as a photographer on the Merseyside Fringe project, covering artistic, musical and community events which gave me enough experience and confidence to land a job with Northern Industrial Photography (or NIP). This lasted a couple of years during which I widened my experience producing product shots, location architectural work, exhibition printing and all the other usual stuff that goes on in a commercial photography studio.

I was offered a position as a photographer grade with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority based at Harwell in Oxfordshire. This position turned out to be as a colour printer and I set about producing prints for the various scientists and photographers involved. Much of the work was highly technical in nature and I learned a great deal about Nuclear science, materials handling and alternative energy production in the process. I stayed for 8 1/2 years during which time I married and started a family.

Government cutbacks and the anti-nuclear backlash at the time meant that my job was about to be outsourced to the private sector so I jumped ship and set up as a freelance, working for many of the designers and agencies I had previously been involved with. I was not happy working as a freelance so did some temping jobs until I found my present position in 1996.

I am currently working as a photographer with Basement Photographic near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. I originally started as Lab. Manager, producing hand and machine prints, processing all films and transparency copying. Around this time I started to get seriously involved with fine art printing, using the facilities to develop my skills first of all with Silver Gelatine then Lith printing. I worked for a couple of external clients which gave me the skills to print to quality on a large scale.

The digital revolution meant the death of the wet darkroom, which I literally had to tear down, and so I became a photographer in the main studio.

 

 

What I feel

ArtofSmart  is a jokey, rhyming take on my name dreamt up by my colleague James Geary. I am not usually one to engage with wordplay- but it seemed just right at the time.

I am devoted to the art of photography and the craft of printmaking. I relish the subtle interplay of science and art and find as time goes on the distinction becoming increasingly blurred.

As a photographer I greatly enjoy  a wide range of subjects from landscape through to portrait and often attempt to record the minutia or unseen details. There is a lot of this in the pictures displayed in my galleries- the beauty of raw emotion in facial expression, the flickering nothingness of swarms of midges, the brilliance of blurred highlights in a deeply shaded wood. I like to portray the insignificant details that are often passed over or ignored as not worthy of attention. My landscapes are always touched by man. There is always the lasting impact that we as humans have created in our landscape and I will generally pass over a raw un-touched natural scene in favour of one where we have erected a fence or created tyre tracks. The world is ours to use but we must also respect its limits. A recurring theme in my work, though not necessarily displayed on this website is a kind of “Back to Eden” ethos whereby nature adapts and prevails. Dereliction becomes the natural order.

The Gum Bichromate printing process allows me to further enhance or adapt my photography by giving me the freedom to add texture, produce depth, highlight specific details and mask others.
No other process I have been involved with has allowed me so much freedom of expression or freestyle destruction of detail as this process. The handmade craft element of the process further enrichens  the thought and application that has gone into making each print a unique experience.
I came close with my Silver Gelatine printing, closer with my toned Lith. Printing and closest of all with the advent of the inkjet (I cannot bring myself to record them as Giclee or fine art prints), but a fine Gum Print will work on every level for me and that is all I can reasonably expect.

On a purely technical note I must point out that although I am exclusively using a digital camera to capture the original image, I do adhere to the original principals and techniques of photography. I do attempt to pre-visualise my final prints at the picture taking stage and I do not manipulate my digital files in any image editing package, other   than to crop, colour balance or generally clean up the artefacts produced by digital cameras and to produce my negatives. I am, however, a quite enthusiastic  user  of the technology to assist in producing my images and frequently employ various HDR software packages to help me produce my results. I see HDR photography as a perfectly legitimate and useful tool in producing a pre-visualised result.

Printing for other people has aways been a challenging and rewarding proposition and I guess I have always been lucky in that I am able to select the people I choose to print for. Through this website I hope to find more people who share in my belief that finely crafted and archival prints can only enhance their work.