My name is David Smith and #Letter365 is my project in collaboration with Bridport Arts Centre.  #Letter365 is an unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year. Each day I create a unique artwork and seal it in an envelope which gets posted or in other ways delivered to the Arts Centre where they are stored ready for an installation of the work in the Allsop Gallery in March 2015.

I trained as a sculptor and printmaker in the days when art schools still taught things like drawing and colour theory.  I was extremely fortunate to have spent 2 years at Colchester School of Art where artists such as Tim Holding, John Carter, Philip Ardizzone, Richard Bawden, Michael Buhler, Hugh Cronyn, Richard Pinkney and others influenced the direction of my life as well as my art.  Three years at Kingston – where David Nash was a visiting lecturer – then gave me time to follow my own inspirations in sculpture and printmaking.

After those heady days the needs of family life led me away from fine art practice. Although in my career I have used my artistic skills in design, graphics, websites and advertising, my own art got rather neglected.  In recent years I have been able to reconnect to the artistic drive in me again and give the time to developing new directions in my work and I am now able to concentrate on it full time.

At present I am mostly making mixed media works on paper, abstract drawings and collages. I have recently completed a project to create a collage every day for a year with eight other artists around the world, under the title #Collage365, the hashtag we used to identify the project on Twitter. My #Collage365 pieces are documented on a blog, Scissors & Glue and some of them will be on display at my exhibition The Seen and The Unseen in the White Rooms at 22 Royal Road, Ramsgate (23-25 August 2014) and at Bridport Arts Centre in November & December 2014

I have a leaning towards minimalism but a delight in the messy. I am continually fascinated by the interplay between chaos and control, emotion and the intellect. The forces of Nature – her patterns and processes – eternally move and inspire me, and landscape forms, especially our British coastline, are nearly always at the heart of my work.