To create Acting the Part, Smith utilized a source image for the background which he scarcely manipulated from its original form. Depicted is a generic mountain scene with a woman rendered in soft focus in the foreground, the lowest portion of her body hidden from the eye due to the canvas’s limitations, leading the audience to wonder if she is grounded or floating in space. Distinguishing the painting from others featured in the presentation, Acting the Part is void of any hard-edged acrylic shapes that characterize much of Smith’s oeuvre. He often relies on these graphic symbols as devices to disrupt the imagined scenes’ believability, however here, it is the non-existent foliage or the red garment that melds and molds as if some sort of fungal mesh that hints at an imagined reality: “I was thinking in a silly way about mycelium, and these thoughts circling about nature’s own network of ideas—that there’s so much in nature we do not know.” Costumed in a bizarre expression of nature that enters the narrative into a whimsical sphere, the figure smiles fair-mindedly, commemorating her existential presence as a bountiful, complex, and unknowable being.

Monuments of Fleeting Feeling encapsulates Smith’s impulse to fuse various contrasting paint techniques into one work. A group of mannerist bodies rejoice amidst a divine shoreline, engaging in a moment of respite from reality on the bounty of what is not. A pastiche of sorts, here, Smith plays into a known narrative structure through the compassionate rendering of figure and landscape, but then subverts it through the introduction of hard-edged acrylic objects, such as a house or a car. These indecipherable, graphic forms play various roles: they are small signifiers of the quotidian life that, for a moment, the figures are escaping; at the same time, they are familiar objects lifted from mass culture and placed into unordinary settings, altering their established meaning and expanding their use. Moreover, Smith is fascinated with exploiting the plastic quality of acrylic paint to the point that it mirrors a commercial object in the same sense that, paradoxically, oil paint, idealized in the world of fine art, can be exploited to mimic human flesh. The work capitalizes on numerous dualities: of absorbing and obliterating art's hierarchical history; of glorified and (perceivably) amateur avenues of art-making; of necessity and possibility within routine and fleeting moments.

Smith begins his studies by making some simple marks and seeing what happens; there is not a type of figure or scene that he preemptively attempts to derive, the process is intuitive and most importantly an exploration of understanding where his compulsions lie. For Smith, constant and continuous research is essential—of the nebulas, the odd, the silly, the unexpected—to see where a painting can lead, afterwards reflecting on its meaning. With Appointed Companion, Smith was thinking about the often complex relationship between criticality and tyranny, and our ability to point to and isolate a problem in one instance, and comfortably coexist with it in another. The painting leans into the realm of mythology, expressed through the disproportionate gremlin-like figure that is far-fetched from reality. While typically a creature of such sorts exalts a negative or beastly connotation, Wayne paints the character as gentle and compatible, a friend to its counterpart rather than a nuisance. Visually, Smith alludes to a dream space as the female figure looks out at what resembles herself and the creature—roles reversed—rendered in his acute graphic treatment of acrylic paint; objects of such style are recurrently used as indicators of the phenomenological unknown.

Minor Holiday Drift depicts a family unit of sorts; we may be looking at a matriarchal figure in the presence of her children, or alternately, a trio of siblings of all different ages. Mining interpersonal dynamics between a group of presented figures is not of primary concern to Smith, although he values both the maker’s and the viewer’s instinctive tendency to reflect on and draw such associations. Rather, Smith assumes an introspective posture, encouraging the exploration of one's individual relationship to the world around them. The trivial objects that accessorize the scene are ones that Smith continuously revisits in his practice. The cinder block is a notable example: a simplistic representation of form, it holds a potential use in terms of building a new structure, but when taken out of that universally understood context, Smith expands its use value, opening doors of wonderment and possibility.

Smith regularly utilizes an airbrush in his work, particularly when rendering figures and spaces. The draw to the tool can be credited to a number of qualities, including his cultural association to it. Growing up in central Florida, Smith was accustomed to a visual culture of artifice and syntheticism defined by this sprayed, whimsical imagery of bright pastel color that constitutes his practice today. Alternately, he admires the tool for its power to bend the expectations of what instruments and processes should be used to make a painting. The atomized diffuse of the spray reflects the surface quality derived from the celebrated painting technique of sfumato, an effect that Renaissance painters actively aspired to achieve. Exemplified in Awash in Search of Awake, the paint device allows hard lines to become atmospheric as the figure's features seamlessly blend and conform to the surrounding natural elements. Considering the intrinsic qualities of his chosen medium, Smith romanticizes the kitschy and outlandish nature of the technique, challenging its objective contempt in the context of fine art.