Don Smith is a professor emeritus of painting at Rhode Island College, where he began teaching in 1964. He was born in Dexter, Missouri and earned degrees in painting from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He has received numerous awards and fellowships and been a visiting artist and lecturer at many schools, including Harvard University, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and others. His work is represented in over fifty public and private collections.

Smith thinks of himself as a painter before an artist. He describes his practice as being informed by “the rules unique to painting” established over the past 300 years. Over his decades long art career, he has worked in both representation and abstraction, but all his work is united by his attitude toward painting as a process of discovery. He says, “when I no longer see “paint” per se, but experience the relationships and their unity the work is resolved.”