Oli’s Goldsmith’s modern-day ‘combines’ merge advanced digital output and transfer processes with paint, ink and other traditional media.

He eagerly experiments with varied techniques – often combining old with the new and creating new hybrid forms in the process. Crisp digital line art, found and sampled photography, iconography and text, invented catch-phrases, drawings and poetic ramblings layer with expressive painting and drawing to create a distinctly rich, colourful and energetic style.

Early inspiration came from media studies; his work is a reflection of our information saturated society where media bombard us all constantly and often subconsciously. Interests in language, communication and iconography are significant influences to the scattered fragments of image and text that populate his paintings.

These often chaotic compositions have a ‘through the looking-glass’ element of reflecting patterns of our media landscape while transporting viewers into an alternate and intensely personal world of the artist.

Disparate and often bizarre elements combine and play off one another in surprising, provocative and often humorous ways. How the mind plays into subtext and suggestion – the subliminal elements often explored in surrealism and automatism are directly connected to Oli’s working process.

Pieces are generally not planned in any particular manner but are formed through an improvisational process, building up layers gradually from ideas in the moment that bounce off one another.

Oli is represented in Vancouver by Gallery Jones [ WWW.GALLERYJONES.COM ]
In Toronto his work is available through Parts Gallery [ WWW.PARTSGALLERY.CA ]