He was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1959 and travelled to America and spent several years there painting and teaching, with his first one-man show at the Green Gallery, New York, in 1961.
[citation needed] Smith's early work drew on packaging and advertising, which led to his being associated by some critics to the Pop Art movement.
[5] Smith stated that his work was "often physically related to hoardings or cinema screens which never present objects actual size; you could drown in a glass of beer, live in a semi-detached cigarette packet".
In Vista he added a shaped extension to the rectangular canvas,[7] and in works such as Piano and Giftwrap progressed to extending the surface of the painting out into three-dimensional space.
In 1972 he exhibited the first of what are called the "kite paintings", in which rather than using a conventional stretcher the canvas is tensioned by cords and structures of aluminium tubing, which become an element in the composition of the works.