Daniel E. Smith:  
The naturalness of growth and change implicit in these painted environments mirrors cycles we see throughout our lives. Realities persist despite our best efforts to manipulate and order life and evidence how completely we participate within nature’s order.

Each expanse suggests the solitary nature of the effort to understand experience. Each structure suggests the communal aspects of that struggle. The painted surface remains as a stage set, waiting for the voice of the meaningful.

Rituals seek to unfold this daily cycle and elevate the happenstance of living to a consciousness. That effort is the realm of spirit and emotion. The act of painting is my ritual and struggle. Visually ordered elements in painting evidence the will to understand but are not in control of time and change.

These works display suggestions of buildings, human-created, utilitarian spaces, and an ordered glance of a natural world. This subject has long been my chosen vocabulary. Beginnings and remains engage and define each space as a form of inquiry. The subject is the cycle of creation and decay as evidenced by these beginnings or remains. The tools are light and color. The meaning is influenced by your entering the struggle to know the world I share with you.