Fowl Extravagance by Colin Smith

Colin Smith taught high school art, theatre, and English for 20 years.  His work has been exhibited in galleries throughout NB and is included in public and private collections.  For 11 years, his drawings and cartoons were featured weekly in the Salon section of the Telegraph Journal.  He works out of his studio in the River Art Centre in downtown Florenceville-Bristol.

Artist Statement

Water, land, and air are always moving and changing each other.  On this pulsing surface is the human stuff: roads and buildings and cities, working with and against everything else, beautiful and complex in its own way.  The whole ball of life is complex as a human body.

Over top of all this (for me, anyway) are birds, living movement and pattern, affected by and affecting everything else.  All of this creates a vast dance, sometimes hard to see but always there.  In a way, the world is grand performance, like a ballet.  Sometimes you sit close to the stage, and you notice the sweat and the dirt, and hear the grunts and heavy footfalls.  Further away, you see the grand arrangements, the choreography, the calculated symmetry of the flickering costumes, the emotion suggested by the backdrops, and maybe you begin to sense an overall meaning.  This is how I see, and that is what I try to show in my drawings - the movement of all things, creating a difficult and rich rhythm.

- Colin Smith, 2026