Author(s): Trish Gribben

artists biographies

Experience the world as Michael Smither has painted it for more than four decades. This book pays homage to Michael Smither as painter and print-maker. The sequence in which the paintings appear is based largely, by loosely, on the studios in which they were created, thus showing the work as it appeared, from studios all over New Zealand. There are separate sections for the artist's prints, murals and explorations into the harmonies of colour. Michael Smither is a painter who has devoted himself with passionate intensity to life as an artist. Born in New Plymouth, Taranaki, in 1939, Smither has produced a vast and varied body of work that has been a major strand in the quest for identity that preoccupied the post-war generations of New Zealanders. In 2004 Smither was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to the arts. The quotes in the captions for the paintings are all from the artist. The paintings have not been cropped in the book. Shortlisted for Montana New Zealand Book Awards: Illustrative Category 2005.