Visitors to Aidan Lee Smith’s studio just outside Margaret River town could be forgiven for assuming they had arrived at a local hangout for bearded, whisky-drinking 30 somethings with a penchant for Mississippi blues.
In fact, they would be halfway correct. The artist’s den sits at the end of a bush driveway and is surrounded by a muster of four wheel drives crowded in among the finer vehicles visiting the region’s latest painting prodigy.
“Someone asked me recently why there’s a bed in my studio,” Smith said during The Mail’s studio visit last week.
“Because it’s where I sleep!”
The ex-lawyer has only been painting full time for a little over a year but has already found himself the darling of the WA art scene with collectors arriving on his doorstep to meet the man behind the bright, expressive works.
One collector, a man from Perth, spotted Smith’s latest piece, a frenzied self portrait produced during a whisky-fuelled evening in the studio.
“He just walked in and said ‘what about that one?’ and I hesitated, because it wasn’t really finished,” Smith said.
The two men discussed the piece for some time before Smith agreed to part with it.
“I got an amazing price for it, but what shocked me more was that people seem to want to see more of this side of my work,” he said.
The gripping self portrait is the second time Smith has focused on his own face rather than the array of pop culture icons that put him in the spotlight.
“I’ve been going through some really intense stuff lately and I wanted to use all that emotion and rawness,” Smith said of his process.
A recent breakdown of a relationship provided the motivation he needed to step away from the brightly coloured portraits of 2015 and into darker territory.
“I know what I want to create, I have this picture in my head and I just want to keep moving towards it so to have people in the studio telling me to keep heading down that path is the best feeling,” he said.
Smith said the Margaret River Region Open Studios program brought hundreds of people through his studio doors and welcomed close to 80 visitors on a single day.
“It’s an awesome event for connecting people to art and getting people to see where art really comes from."
