Ollie Smith

Making paintings using stencilling with spray paint, brushing acrylics, and pouring epoxy resin. Over the past ten years, I've been bringing together bright, colourful collections of imagery and painting them on canvases, wooden boards and aluminium. My portfolio covers a diverse range of popular culture and everyday imagery, focussing on the language of symbols and play.

The underlying message in my work is questioning ordinary communication and storytelling as a form of therapy — a stream of dyspraxic consciousness in search of meaning and a state of well-being. Culminating in complex combinations of desires and fears that inspire personal interpretation.

My paintings typically start with drawing, where I trace and redraw a wide range of imagery — nature, children's toys, wallpaper patterns, comic book thought bubbles, skulls. Colour is hugely important and usually bold and bright with clean hard-lined edges, with an almost graphic, manufactured feel. Thick layers of clear resin make the colours pop.

More recently, stencilling has been replaced by cutting out with a handheld router. The cutting becomes a drawing process which leaves channels in the surfaces, filled with resin.