Durrell Lamar Smith — Atlanta, GA
Mixed media assemblage, watercolor, and oil — for collectors, galleries, and anyone who believes the handmade thing is still the most radical choice. Available for representation.
Watercolor · Turmeric Dye, 2025 
Watercolor · India Ink, 2025 
Watercolor · Commission, 2025 Chapter I
Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Original
A slumped bobwhite quail rendered in dense black ink and yellow ochre — feathers caught in cascading splatter, the body folded into itself against a stained vertical ground of red, yellow, and indigo drips. Stencil letterforms "A" and "E" bracket the bird, the title reading "A DEAD" by visual sleight. A meditation on the small game bird as both subject and elegy — the hunter's relationship to what is killed, kept, and remembered.
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Mixed Media Assemblage on Canvas · Original
Companion to "For My Daughter" — heavy gestural strokes of black, orange, and yellow break across a silver and white ground, the surface punctuated by real preserved sunflowers and roses embedded into the impasto. Inscribed "For My Son" in the lower margin, the work is part offering, part inheritance — markmaking as the form a father's tenderness takes when it cannot stay still.
Inquire Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Original
A crouched, intensely focused figure rendered in teal, crimson, and black — gestural white marks cut across the composition like notation on a staff. The words "Melody, Markmaking, Songwriting" are inscribed in the lower corner, and "Simple'Em" floats to the left, anchoring this as a meditation on the act of creative making. A companion to the first Songwriter work.
Inquire Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Commission
A hunting dog stands alert in a vast golden desert landscape beneath a stormy graphite sky — the mountains of Palm Springs rendered in layered washes of ochre, mauve, and black India ink. Handwritten words — "human," "relationship," "dogs," "grateful glimpse" — are embedded in the ground, turning this commission into a quiet meditation on the bond between person and animal. Made for Simon Perkins.
Commission Similar Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Original
A reclining figure dissolves into warm golden washes — teal, crimson, and white marks suggest a body caught mid-movement, perhaps swimming or falling. Bold stencil-like letterforms flank the composition, and the phrase "inspiration for the maker" is inscribed lightly above. Graphite and turmeric dye warm the paper ground, giving the work a sun-bleached, heat-haze quality.
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Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Original
An abstracted figure emerges from cascading washes of yellow, teal, and grey — ink drips and gestural marks suggesting the fluid, sometimes chaotic act of creation. Turmeric dye lends a warm organic undertone to a composition that feels simultaneously improvised and inevitable.
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Watercolor · India Ink on Watercolor Paper · Original
A lush, sunlit hound moves through a dense tropical landscape — palm fronds rendered with careful botanical attention against warm amber washes. The dog's alert poise and the verdant surroundings create a tender, almost cinematic stillness.
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Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite · Turmeric Dye on Watercolor Paper · Original
A pointer stands alert among loose golden pine strokes on a soft pink ground — the dog captured with energetic economy of line while the surrounding pines are laid in bold, gestural marks. Graphite and turmeric dye add warmth and texture to this field study of a hunting dog in repose.
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Oil on Canvas · Original
A bold, cubist-inflected composition in electric blue, yellow, and green — interlocking geometric forms suggest architecture, landscape, and figure simultaneously. Painted with confident impasto strokes, this oil work pulses with energy and colour, a visual celebration rendered in the language of the avant-garde. Work by Ashley Smith.
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Watercolor on Paper · Original
Deep crimson and violet washes swirl around a central void — the word "MINOTAURO" inscribed at the top, "DUENDE" at the bottom, bookending a horned creature emerging from layered mist. A mythic, atmospheric work that channels Lorca's concept of duende — the dark, irrational spirit that animates great art.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
A horizon of cursive script unfurls across a pewter and cream ground — calligraphic strokes in oil-black ink moving like wind over water, broken by dense passages of collage, ochre, and impasto. The work invokes Odysseus less as hero than as wanderer — the long, looping return that writes itself out across years. The script never quite resolves into legible words; it remains the rhythm of the journey rather than its translation.
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Watercolor · India Ink on Paper · Original
A vizsla locked on point among slender birch and aspen trunks — golden and chartreuse foliage layered in loose botanical washes, the dog rendered in warm earth tones and confident ink linework. A field study of a working hunting dog set into the high northwoods, the composition equally portrait and landscape.
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Watercolor on Paper · Original
Warm mauve and terracotta washes evoke the heat and dust of a bullring — loose figures gather on the left, a dark bull stands at centre, while a solitary man with a cane observes from the right. The title "DUENDE" floats above the scene in spare letterform, invoking the mysterious force of passion, danger, and presence that defines flamenco, bullfighting, and art itself.
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Garment · Waxed Cotton · Sustainable Materials · Designed by Durrell Smith
A field-worn waxed cotton hunting jacket designed by Durrell Smith, lined with a custom-printed textile patterning the Original Dogman wordmark with English Pointer silhouettes and bobwhite quail over typewritten field notes. The piece bridges studio practice and the sporting life — the garment as wearable assemblage, made from sustainable materials, finished by hand. One in a small run.
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Mixed Media Assemblage on Canvas · Original
A luminous assemblage of gilded florals — sunflowers, peonies, and roses cast in gold — layered over a textured black-and-white canvas with delicate pink ribbon. An intimate and deeply personal work that transforms botanical abundance into an offering of love and legacy.
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Mixed Media Assemblage on Canvas · Original
Bold gesture marks in black against charged yellow — raw burlap, dried botanicals, and a small preserved butterfly at the center. The number 444 carries its own quiet symbolism within a composition that feels both primal and ceremonial, assemblage as ritual.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
Two Sankofa heart symbols — the Adinkra emblem meaning "to go back and get it" — rise in crimson against a densely worked ground of gold leaf, black gestural mark-making, and collaged cityscape fragments. Within each heart, a luminous urban skyline emerges, wedding the ancestral symbol to the modern city. A meditation on return, memory, and the architecture of inheritance.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
A densely worked surface in cream, ochre, and graphite black — calligraphic mark-making layered over collaged fragments, with an oval and a single ringed circle anchoring the lower register. Heavy impasto, scraped passages, and gestural line collide across the canvas, a meditation on union as something forged through accumulation and erasure rather than tidy resolution.
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Watercolor · India Ink on Paper · Original
Two hunting dogs press close together, rendered with assured ink linework over luminous watercolor washes of lavender, teal, and green. The title "BRACE" — a term for a pair of game birds or dogs — floats across the sky in spare letterform, the bond between the animals palpable in their overlapping forms.
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Mixed Media on Paper · Original
A face emerges from dense, heavily worked layers — ochre, teal, purple, and charcoal — with expressive marks suggesting both mask and portrait. The textured surface, built from mixed media including what appears to be sand or grit, gives the face a monumental, sculptural quality. Urgent and searching.
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Mixed Media Assemblage on Canvas · Original
A dense, layered assemblage of torn materials, broken glass, birch bark, and paint — earthy browns, muted greens, and deep blacks collide in a composition of controlled tension. Named for the Roman god of boundaries, this work explores thresholds, endings, and the rawness of what lies at the edge.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
A monumental 48×72 assemblage — explosive red gesture marks and dense black linework over collaged photographic imagery, newspaper, and heavily worked paint. Faces emerge and dissolve beneath cascading mark-making; the scale demands the kind of attention a whisper never could. One of the largest and most commanding works in the collection.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
A raw, earthen surface of scratched and layered mixed media — white paint scraped back to reveal warm wood beneath, with a bold red numeral and torn collage fragments. The title grounds the work in place and soil, the marks reading like geological strata, like something dug up rather than made.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · Original
Gold leaf catches the light against torn collage, terracotta drips, and textured white impasto — the word "MEANWHILE" barely legible beneath layers of paint and material. A work about what is taken and what remains, the residue of identity and the beauty that persists despite erasure.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · SCAD
A pink-white painted panel stenciled with the word "WINTER," wrapped in gold leaf and pierced by torn fragments of black ornamental frame. Suspended below, a gold-painted serving tray bears a gilded wine bottle and miniature vessels — a wall-mounted altar to indulgence and decay, the language of opulence emptied of its function. From a SCAD graduate series.
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Mixed Media Assemblage · SCAD
A black square panel set against scarlet, framed by torn fragments of gilt baroque moulding at opposing corners — a small inset of grayscale roses and a single bar of teal acts as a fault line in the surface. Below, a pair of gold-painted high-top sneakers dangle from twisted black laces. The work pits institutional grandeur against the contemporary vernacular, the gilded frame against the gilded shoe. From a SCAD graduate series.
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Mixed Media on Canvas · Original
A riotous, energetic canvas of sweeping black arcs, vivid splashes of crimson, yellow, teal, and blue — gesture marks colliding with crackled paint surface in a composition that feels like pure id released onto canvas. One of the earliest works in the collection, it already demonstrates the fearless, layered approach that defines the body of work.
InquireArtist Statement
I make marks the way a body moves — before thought, before intention, before the word arrives.
Duende is the center of my practice. Not as metaphor, but as method. Lorca described it as the dark, earthen force that burns through the throat of the singer, the feet of the dancer — the thing that cannot be taught or summoned, only survived. I have come to understand my work as an attempt to stay open to it. To keep the hand moving until something true comes through.
My materials are watercolor, India ink, graphite, and turmeric dye on paper. The turmeric is not incidental — it is a pigment pulled from the earth, ancient in its use, bodily in its warmth. It stains the paper the way experience stains memory. It connects the work to something that predates the canvas, predates the gallery, predates the name we give to art.
I am a formally trained painter who distrusts formality. What I trust is the mark — the gesture that survives revision, the line that carries more than it was meant to, the evidence of a hand that did not stop to ask permission. Markmaking is not technique. It is a condition of being human, as fundamental as breath, as old as the first hand pressed against stone.
My figures are rarely resolved. They are caught mid-becoming — suspended in the moment before the song lands, before the meaning clarifies. I am not interested in arrival. I am interested in the quality of attention paid in the reaching.
That is where duende lives. Not in the finished thing. In the wound the making leaves behind.
Chapter II
A long-running collaboration built on shared late nights, half-finished cups of tea, and the belief that songs and pictures belong together. New music arriving late 2025.
— Made with AshleyChapter III
Past — 2022
Vinings, Atlanta, GA
Solo Exhibition — Works by Durrell & Ashley Smith
Past — 2023
Grassroots Coffee Roasters
Thomasville, GA · Solo Exhibition
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Every commission starts with a conversation. Whether you're a collector with something specific in mind, a gallery seeking a site-responsive work, or someone with a story that needs illustrating — write and we'll find the right shape for it together.
Start a ConversationInk on paper · 4–6 weeks
On paper · 8–10 weeks
Mixed media assemblage · Gallery-quality · By inquiry
Large-scale · By inquiry
Covers, interiors, spot illustration
About
Durrell Lamar Smith is a painter and assemblage artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. Working across watercolor, mixed media assemblage, oil, and India ink on paper, his practice is rooted in the Lorcan concept of duende — the dark, earthen force that animates authentic creative expression. His work explores markmaking as a fundamental condition of human experience, drawing on myth, music, and the lyric impulse as primary materials.
Smith holds a Master of Arts in Art Education from Boston University (2018). His work has been exhibited in Atlanta and across Georgia, and is held in private collections. He works in close collaboration with his wife, artist Ashley Smith.
DASH Creatives is open to gallery representation, institutional exhibition, and site-responsive commissions. Inquiries welcome.
Get in TouchEducation
M.A. Art Education
Boston University, 2018
Solo Exhibitions
American Soil American Soul
Grassroots Coffee Roasters, Thomasville, GA · 2023
American Soul American Soul
Vinings, Atlanta, GA · 2022
Early Exhibition
Millstone Gallery, Atlanta, GA · c. 2012
Practice
Watercolor · India Ink · Graphite
Turmeric Dye · Mixed Media Assemblage
Oil on Canvas
Based
Atlanta, Georgia
Working everywhere.
Chapter VI
For commissions, gallery inquiries, press, or just to say hello — fill out the form or write directly.