Standing in the midst of “grace”, inside a renovated barn in Chatham, NY, situated in a minimally manicured field, I rely on my camera to regard it all in one fell swoop. Like the snow falls in a paper weight – dense and pervasive - some of the work sits along the shelves, while others seem to move at you. My camera and I are partners in this interview, and I trust that it will help locate the questions for this exchange.
Ed Smith is beside me, recovering from a bit of unscheduled fathering this Sunday morning. We briefly exchange parental philosophies, and then charge headlong into talk about discipline and art.
“It’s not a free for all” I can hear him repeatedly warning his students at Marist. And here is the perfect segue from his task as parental disciplinarian into focused talk about the extraordinary rigors of printmaking, and wax sculptures, demanding years of learning the craft, studying the masters and self study within both traditional and popular culture. Is the artist’s world any different from yours or mine? I think so. Do we share his contextual framework? Maybe. Somewhat. Do personalized sensory filters shift our vision and therefore our thinking. I think so.
But back to "grace". Ed feeds his wood stove and we talk about a lot of stuff, including the gentrification of Chatham and how this is bad for the farmers, artists, and blue collar workers, who now live in trailers since that’s all they can afford. He mentions the conflicts between “yuppie” dinner parties and the occasional un-timeliness of manure spreading. All the while, I listen, but I am not quite connecting to his angers towards the shift of his uppity community into a place that seems to resent poor people. You see, there is this work surrounding me which is full of grace. Yes, it’s about war, and heroism and human battling each other for god knows what, but this is just the beginning of what surrounds me. There are guns, body parts, contradictions, snake like forms, and in-your-face nasty goings on! But no red for blood, sharp for pain or brittle for fragile.
I see fields of white, like the skin of Moby Dick, as if these battles before me represent hope, pure conflict and exquisitely designed struggles. This is a soulful search for grace – saying it like it is – not trying to be clever or smartly cool. Within a focused framework of “heroism” and human issues of dissent and dispute, Ed Smith clears his personal voice with vivid pictorial vignettes of the fight to save our humanity . But it doesn’t stop there. Shelves of table sized waxes and bronze sculptures, a wall of prints revealing a human world of progressive complexities, my attention is secured, by unrelenting quantities of repetitious shapes . What strikes me is an insatiable quest for “honor” through suites of personalized metaphors.. At the center of the studio is a formidably proud work of figuration, waiting to be finished, or finished but waiting, I’m not sure which. Smith tells me that he was thinking about the fall of the world trade centers in this piece. It is my favorite - a modeled wax - two legs, not belonging to the same individual, one tall, the other not, with serpentine creatures, and one clunky overused foot. I suppose the pilgrimage tattered the skin, swelled the tendons, and now, it waits. Because it can’t hop from foot to foot. There is only one. So, art matters, after all. So does Ed Smith. And war matters. But winning doesn’t. Winning is what happens when the other side loses, but I can’t really tell by the fragmentation and battle remnants in Smith’s friezes which side brings it all home. The quiet serving up of the honor of fighting for anything that matters is just under (or right beside) the roughly textured surfaces of his work. I’m just not sure whether the honor and heroism of battle ought to be listed in our human Hall of Fame, above and beyond the local farmers, givers of our food and sustainers of our lives, mentioned in the beginning of this article. Ed Smith is a Guggenheim Fellow in Sculpture and Drawing. He was a First Alternate Prix de Rome, has received numerous awards including Fulbright, Teaching Excellence, Ford Foundation grants and more. He exhibits internationally. Professor at Bard College, New York Studio School and others, and now on the faculty of Marist College, and the Marist College Art Gallery director. The Marist College Art Gallery is located on the Poughkeepsie campus in a former steel plant across the road from the main campus. The exhibition program focuses on contemporary regional artists. You can see works of Ed Smith in a group exhibition at the Lesley Hellery Gallery at 90 East 92nd Street in Manhattan. (between Fifth and Madison) lesleyheller.com for information. Judy Sigunick is a Cragsmoor based artist, who works, lives and teaches in the Hudson Valley. .
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