Biography
Ian McKenzie Smith (b. Montrose, Scotland, UK 1935) work shows his continuing commitment to a distinctly personal brand of landscape based abstraction: a subtle evocative way of painting that owes something to Eastern traditions, as well as the American colour-field painters of the 1950’s. A travelling scholarship took him to Paris, where he met the Japanese artist Kenzo Okada and encountered Zen philosophy. An oriental sense of balance and calligraphic finesse has been a feature of his work ever since. He was director of the Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums during for some thirty years and is Past President of the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour and a former Trustee of the National Galleries of Scotland.
