David Smith-Harrison - prints and biography
Contemporary Printmaker Exploring Architecture and Landscape as Quiet, Enduring Presences
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio, printed to edge of sheet with deckled edges
Year: 1997
Edition of 135
Image Size: 16 inches X 12 inches
La Puerta III is a mixed-media intaglio print by David Smith-Harrison, depicting a palm tree rising above a finely rendered Spanish architectural gate set within a softly suggested landscape. The composition combines precise linear intaglio work with a warm watercolor wash and subtle pencil embellishments, lending the image both structure and atmosphere. The palm—isolated and monumental—serves as a vertical counterpoint to the classical symmetry of the stone gateway below, while faint mountainous forms recede into the background. Smith-Harrison’s integration of architectural detail and natural imagery reflects his interest in historical European settings interpreted through a contemporary printmaking sensibility.
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: drypoint on plexi
Imagesize: 9.5 inches X 8 inches
Papersize: 17 inches X 14 inches
Edition of 6
Year: 1987
By: David Smith-Harrison
Hand colored Intaglio
Medium: (hard ground etching and aquatint)
Image size: 7.5" x 5.5"
Paper size: 13" x 11"
Printing element: 1 copperplate
Edition Size: 135
Price: $500
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
ProjectedEditionSize: 135
ImageSize: 7.5 x 5.5
PaperSize: 13 x 11
Year: 1998
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
ProjectedEditionSize: 135
ImageSize: 7.5 x 5.5
PaperSize: 13 x 11
Year: 1998
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Edition of 200
Paper Size: 7.75 inches X 17.5 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Etching and Acquatint
Year: July 2004
Paper Size: 26.5 inches X 33.5 inches
Image Size: 20 inches X 28 inches
A richly layered etching and aquatint that merges landscape, architecture, and memory. A leafless orchard stretches across the upper portion of the composition, its repeating rows of trees rendered with quiet precision and atmospheric depth. Beneath the field, a faint architectural elevation—suggesting a classical façade—emerges like a palimpsest, partially embedded in the ground.
Smith-Harrison’s combination of photographic imagery with etched line and tonal aquatint creates a dialogue between the natural and the constructed, the present and the historical. The winter orchard evokes stillness and passage of time, while the underlying architectural drawing introduces a sense of cultural memory and structure. The result is a contemplative work that reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of place, history, and layered perception.
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio, hardground etching, aquatint
Year: 2005
Projected Edition: 200
Image Size: 8" x 8"
Paper Size: 12 " x 11"
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 2004
Edition Size: 200
Paper Size: Somerset Satin White
Image Size: 4" x 6"
Paper Size: 11 " x 12"
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 2005
Projected Edition Size: 160
Image Size: 4.5" x 3.5"
Paper Size: 8" x 6.25"
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1988
Paper Size: 22 inches X 26 inches
Image Size: 18 inches X 16 inches
Like much of his work, Royal Palm has atmosphere of the Mediterranean, but all of the elements are rooted in the artist's neighborhood. The arches along the bottom of the print are from the façade of the Barker Building in Berkeley. The floor plan in the center right is is a reference to Charles A Platt: the Artist as
Architect. It also contains drawings of a Mayan building and drawings by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Royal Palm with Turkish Design is an interplay between the architectural rendering and the modeled line work of the palm. The border in the upper half of the print features a pattern from an early Ottoman brocade.
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Etching
Edition of 145
Paper Size: 46 inches X 31.5 inches
Image Size: 36 inches X 24 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1997
Edition of 160
Paper Size: 11 inches X 12 inches
Image Size: 5.5 inches X 7 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Hand colored Intaglio
Medium: (hard ground etching and aquatint)
Image size: 7.5" x 5.5"
Paper size: 13" x 11"
Printing element: 1 copperplate
Edition Size: 135
Price: $500
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Unique hand-colored intaglio photogravure
Year: 2018
Edition: Unique
Image Size: 18 x 11.5 inches
Sheet Size: 23.5 x 16.5 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1999
Edition of 160
Paper Size: 18 inches X 15 inches
Image Size: 9.25 inches X 8 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 2003
Edition of 200
Image Size: 12 inches X 9 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio, Black and white
Year: 1989
Edition of 125
Image Size: 12 inches X 8 Inches
Price on request
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
ProjectedEditionSize: 200
ImageSize: 10 x 8
PaperSize: 19.5 x 15
Year: 2004
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Editionsize: 200
ImageSize: 5.75 in. x 8 in.
Year: 2003
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Editionsize: 200
ImageSize: 5.75 in. x 8 in.
Year: 2003
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
ProjectedEditionsize: 200
ImageSize: 3 in. x 3 in.
PaperSize: 5.5 x 6.5
Year: 2004
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1996
Edition of 175
Paper Size: 36 inches X 30 inches
Image Size: 27 inches X 24 inches
Framed price: $3000
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1997
Edition of 135
Paper Size: 16 inches X 15 inches
Image Size: 8 inches X 8 inches
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Year: 1989
Edition of 125
Image Size: 12 inches X 8 Inches
Price on request
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio/gravure
Papersize: 16 inches X 15 inches
Imagesize: 6.75 inches X 6.25 inches
Edition of 145 evYear: 1993
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: Intaglio
Papersize: 15"x 17"
Imagesize: 10' x 13"
ProjectedEdition of 50
Year: 2003
David Smith-Harrison
Biography
David Smith-Harrison is a contemporary American printmaker whose work explores architecture and landscape as quiet, enduring presences—structures shaped by time rather than by human drama. His prints are marked by meticulous draftsmanship, layered color, and a deep sensitivity to atmosphere. Though human figures are absent, the works feel inhabited by memory.
Smith-Harrison’s compositions often focus on industrial forms, architectural frameworks, bridges, towers, and skeletal constructions that hover between solidity and dissolution. Light moves across surfaces with subtle gradation, revealing texture and depth while preserving ambiguity. In this way, his work engages architecture not merely as subject matter, but as metaphor: structure as history, structure as endurance, structure as fragility.
His interest in architectural space places him in thoughtful dialogue with François Houtin, whose intricately imagined landscapes and built environments similarly invite contemplation. Like Houtin, Smith-Harrison uses precision and restraint to create immersive worlds that reward prolonged viewing.
Yet where Houtin often leans toward narrative suggestion, Smith-Harrison embraces a more distilled stillness. The absence of figures intensifies the viewer’s awareness of form, shadow, and spatial rhythm. Buildings become protagonists. Framework becomes gesture.
In certain works, his structural abstractions also resonate with the architectural investigations of Stephen McMillan, whose prints examine industrial forms and engineered systems. Both artists explore how constructed environments shape perception, though Smith-Harrison’s tone remains quieter—more atmospheric than analytical.
Landscape plays an equally important role in his practice. Whether depicting open terrain, water, or transitional urban edges, Smith-Harrison renders space as something slowly unfolding. His horizons feel suspended in time. Weather, light, and seasonal shifts become compositional forces.
Technically, Smith-Harrison’s layered color etchings and monotypes demonstrate a command of subtle tonal shifts. His surfaces often appear weathered, as if the image itself has endured exposure. This material sensitivity reinforces the thematic undercurrent of duration and erosion.
There is a meditative quality throughout his body of work. By removing the human figure, Smith-Harrison shifts attention toward presence without narrative. The viewer is not asked to follow a story, but to inhabit a space.
His prints offer architecture and landscape not as spectacle, but as slow experiences—structures holding memory, light resting on form, and silence becoming the subject itself.
By: David Smith-Harrison
Medium: 6 plate color etching w/ aquatint
Year: 2001
Edition of 135
Image Size: 18 inches X 16 Inches
Paper size: 26.5” x 22.5”
The architectural imagery in Cotoneaster is drawn from a niche on the south wall of the Great Mosque of Córdoba in southern Spain. Originally an Islamic landmark and later altered with Christian ornamentation following the Reconquista, the site reflects layered cultural and religious histories. The cotoneaster itself carries symbolic value, representing resilience, adaptability, and endurance.
View progressive proofs showing how Cotoneaster was built through successive printed plates.