Lucien Smith, the celebrated artist who found success at an early stage in his career and became known for his “Rain Paintings,” died from an overdose of fentanyl and oxycodone, the New York City medical examiner’s office said on Thursday.
His death was ruled an accident.
On Sept. 7, at around 8 p.m., the police received a call for a wellness check at an address in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Upon arriving, officers discovered Mr. Smith unconscious, unresponsive and lying face down next to a bed.
Emergency medical workers pronounced Mr. Smith, who was 37, dead at the scene.
In the weeks after Mr. Smith’s death, a makeshift memorial was set up outside FOOD, a revived art-hub restaurant in Chinatown that he and the chef Mathieu Canet opened last year. His friends and family also gathered for a memorial service in Montauk, on the tip of Long Island’s South Fork, where he lived and worked.
Bill Powers, the founder of Half Gallery in Manhattan, where Mr. Smith held his first solo exhibition in New York in 2012, said in an interview that they last spoke at the end of August. Mr. Smith was five days sober at the time, according to Mr. Powers.
“He was kind of like a son to me, or some people thought that I was a little bit of a father figure, in that way, to him,” Mr. Powers said, adding that they had ascended up the ladder of the art world together. “He was my first star.”
Text messages from Mr. Smith, dated weeks before his death and provided by Mr. Powers, depicted someone struggling. The artist described having “bad anxiety attacks” and being at a “low point.” He said he was also feeling “burnt out” from FOOD.
At the end of August, Mr. Smith created four new “Rain Paintings” on an abandoned baseball field at Camp Hero in Montauk. The artist reconsidered his technique of spray painting with a fire extinguisher, a practice he had used for his previous “Rain Paintings,” and built a spray-paint machine with an air compressor. The paintings went on display last month in a show titled “Delay of Game” at the Tripoli Gallery in Wainscott, N.Y., that runs through Nov. 23.
The title of the show is a baseball reference to the tarp that is pulled over the field to protect it from inclement weather or, in this case, to prevent “paint from hitting the field,” Tripoli Patterson, owner of Tripoli Gallery and friend of Mr. Smith, said.
The painting session was closed to the public. Ahead of it, Mr. Patterson sourced materials between Manhattan and the Hamptons, offering an unusual level of involvement. “It was the most involved I’ve ever been in a show,” Mr. Patterson said. “I don’t generally get to see artists in the process of making.”
The fashion photographer Zev Starr-Tambor and the painter and filmmaker Julian Schnabel also watched from the sidelines. “I think Julian showing up meant a lot to him,” Mr. Patterson said.
Mr. Smith painted with precision. “He knew exactly each mark he was making,” Mr. Patterson said. “He knew where each drop was going to land.”
It had been 12 years since Mr. Smith had worked with a gallery. He resented a system in which others profited from his work without sharing those profits with him, Mr. Patterson said. In 2011, Mr. Smith sold a painting, “Hobbes, The Rain Man, and My Friend Barney/Under the Sycamore Tree,” from his Cooper Union student thesis show for $10,000. In 2013, Phillips resold that piece for $389,000. Mr. Smith did not benefit from the secondary market sale.
A New York Times review of the Tripoli show last month described the title of the paintings as cloyingly sweet — “Love is a trusting creature” and “Love and cough cannot be hidden.”
“But their creation now forms a subtly affecting meditation on reclamation and acceptance,” the critic, Max Lakin, wrote. “Notably, the exhibition is billed as the remnants of a live performance. A better word is ‘exorcism.’ In videos the gallery posted, Smith is seen crouched on the tarp holding the compressor nozzle in a loose grip. He grins the wide grin of re-enchantment, ghosts and bad spirits being pressure blasted into something approaching grace.”
People in Mr. Smith’s circle are continuing to process his death. “It’s one of those things,” Mr. Powers said. “If he could have seen how much love and respect and affection there was for him, maybe that would have given him the strength to turn it around.”
Maria Cramer contributed reporting.
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