INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SMITH-HARRISON
AN UNCONSCIOUS
DIALOGUE THROUGH
T H E C E N T U R I E S
By: Mary B. Moorhead
David Smith-Harrison lives and works in a carefully tended world apart.
One enters his domain by way of a small patio that links his studio and home, and immediately delights in the magenta fuchsias, creamy calla lilies, thriving topiaried plants, the tart smell of ripe lemons, bushy palms against the blue sky, and several satisfied, sleeping cats. Here and there, a sharp eye can recognize plants from Smith-Harrison’s meticulous etchings and watercolors. Red-berried cotoneaster plants fill a balcony, and Smith-Harrison shows off a cotoneaster bonsai of his own creation.
Every inch of space serves a creative purpose, indoors and out. Smith-Harrison’s studio is dedicated
to designing and etching, and the home area acts as an extension: various stages of printmaking and editioning occur downstairs, while the upstairs is primarily for painting and watercolors. In both studio and home, visual imagery
is central and pervasive. The walls, hallways, doors, refrigerator, even the ceilings are covered collage-style with carefully placed images. Imagery comes from many sources, from art books and magazines to the camera of Smith-Harrison. His many etchings and watercolors are everywhere, side by side with the works of other artists. Two of Smith- Harrison’s larger etching , Yucatan and Dos Palmeras, framed and hanging against a collaged wall, rivet the viewer. Even the windows offer stunning visuals, ever-changing panoramas of the San Francisco Bay, Golden Gate Bridge, Albany Hill, and the East Bay hills.
We start our interview in Smith-Harrison’s home, moving between the kitchen, dining area and living room. Tall, sandyhaired, eloquently loquacious and lively, Smith Harrison would make a fantastic instructor in studio art or art history. He shakes his head when I remark on this, explaining that he prefers the life of the full time artist.
Mary Moorhead: You are so absolutely surrounded by imagery of all types. May I assume that the works of other artists inform your own?
David Smith-Harrison : Oh, yes. I look to the Old Masters, other well-known artists, and my contemporaries for both inspiration and education. It’s a common aspect of an artist’s education torefer to art that’s been created or is being created as they work.
MM: Can you cite specific examples?
DSH: Both here in my home and in the studio, there are dozens of books open to artists, architects, and photographers, past and present. My mentors include Old Masters artists, such as [Albrecht] Dürer, da Vinci, Michelangelo, [Giovanni Battista] Piranesi, [Andrea] Mantegna, and Rembrandt. Additionally, I look to nineteenth century pictorial photographers like Clarence White, [Alfred] Stieglitz or [Edward] Steichen, and nineteenth century botanical artists such as Joseph Redouté. The architectural monologues of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles A. Platt also inform my work. And of course, there are my contemporaries: Trevor Southey, Betty Freedman, François Houtin, Eric Desmazières and Christopher Brown to name just a few. Their art inspires me and keeps me company while I work. When I take a break from drawing on a plate, I’ll flip through a book, either for my own pleasure or to understand how other artists solve problems, deal with compositional ideas, or line work. I study Old Masters print work primarily to see how they employ techniques such as crosshatching and drafting the contours of lines that describe forms. Occasionally I’ll flip to a page and study one particular aspect that relates to a current project. Say, for my rose prints, I’ll study how other artists handled the drawing of flowers. I don’t slavishly copy their works; it’s for inspiration, technical analysis, and to create a dialogue. And when I have created something that might have gained the interest, appreciation, or admiration of an artist long gone, sometimes I’ll say out loud, “Oh, my God, I’ve made a print that Rembrandt would admire.”
MM: Why all these pictures on the walls, even the ceiling? Is it to stimulate your subconscious?
DSH: Yes, I like to play with all of these images and then absorb them over time into my unconscious. That’s why I have so many open books and collaged walls. There are relationships happening with the collage. I’ll put the images up very unconsciously—think, “Oh, this goes here, that goes there,” but I let my unconscious mind do the placements. Then I’ll sit back and glance at the associations that become apparent and conscious at a later moment.
MM: This looks like so much work. It’s all so neatly and exactly placed. Why bother? Are you trying to say something?
DSH: No, not quite. It’s a way of seeing the world, about learning to see and appreciating what I see. For example, here, it might have been the humor of this Leonardo da Vinci that intrigued me. See, he’s pointing at these two women. A lot of times it can be the compositional movement of juxtaposed images. Look, these two reproductions are the same image. But I flipped one around so it looks like the figures are moving into each other. See it? I just hooked them up together. Often, I will unconsciously find lines that move into each other or colors that move into each other. When I juxtapose images, or when an artist’s compositional idea really appeals to me, I’ll reinterpret or expand the idea. As I mentioned, it’s a dialogue. As if to say, “Oh, you did this really well, let me see if I can do something a bit more personal with this particular articulation.”
MM: Is this an aspect of your creative process, as compared to someone else who would prefer the simplicity of white walls?
DSH: Yes, I need to see art, to play with images, see relationships. Look at my large intaglio print, El Olivo. See how the tree floats in the air above a cityscape? The compositional idea for that print developed out of a print made by Albrecht Dürer; the title escapes me. Dürer created a lovely cityscape rooftop view of houses, placed at the bottom of the image; in the sky above, there is an angel standing on a ball. As I worked out the compositional ideas for El Olivo, I ended up creating a very elaborate cityscape. I was not sure what to do with the skies. Then I came across that floating angel. Because I’m so drawn to creating tree imagery, it was natural for me to float the tree in the air, replacing Dürer’s compositional idea of the angel on the ball.
MM: Tell me more about your interest in Dürer.
DSH: Oh, I’ve always felt very connected to Albrecht Dürer’s work. He was Northern European Renaissance and very disciplined. Dürer influenced my approach to image making and line work. I also look heavily to the Italian Renaissance artists because of the way they handle both their crosshatching and line work. There’s a bit more fluidity to their compositions. Further, I like the combination of volume and space that appears in Renaissance art.
[Points to image on the wall] See how there’s this strong sense of volume, yet at the same time, there is a sense
of very deep space. It was a really important part of the Renaissance art to view space that way. [Smith-Harrison points to his color etching Cotoneaster and to an image on the wall.] I do not remember referring to this image when I created Cotoneaster. Yet looking at the image right now, I see the relationship. See the archway here and the two columns, and then the figure of the Christ in the middle? My cotoneaster plant is in the center of an archway, like the image of Christ. While my work is strongly rooted in the Renaissance and nineteenth century pictorial photography, my work is very modern. A nineteenth century or Renaissance artist would not have handled space the way I have in this image. [Pointing to his etching, Dos Palmeras] You see the way the trees are floating in and out of
the architecture like that? The way the tile-work at the bottom of the print blends and becomes this background space? This is somewhat Japanese, looking up like that. A Renaissance artist would rarely have done this kind of juxtaposition. And here are more modern influences: see these slashes, these very aggressive textural marks? Those take away the preciousness of the very tight drawing. They create a sense of atmosphere and movement. Further, they activate the surface of the image. They are equally important to the spirit and overall impact of the piece as the traditional elements.
MM: Looking around, it strikes me that you have clearly chosen etching as your print technique of choice thus far in your career. Was this happenstance or a purposeful choice?
DSH: Although my early training was primarily in lithography, I discovered that intaglio offers a very different surface quality. With intaglio, I can work sculpturally into the plate’s surface. Working deeper into the plate allows me to create a textural surface. These textural characteristics are then translated onto the print during printing. This extra, subtle dimension in the print surface is very important to me. If you were to look at this print under a magnifying glass [referring to Yucatan], you would see that the darkest dark, in these little spots here, is etched much deeper into the plate than these very delicate gray passages. This creates movement, moves your eye around the entire piece of work.
MM: Tell me why trees are often your subject matter.
DSH: There are many influences. When I was young, our family had a cabin near a canyon where there are many kinds of trees. I loved my time there and actually started drawing trees there. Later, as I discovered my art interests, I was largely influenced by the Utah artists working at that time. Many of the Utah artists were doing landscapes. So my early work was pretty traditional watercolors out on location. Then I started focusing on specific trees. Dürer’s plant studies were an early influence as well. As an adult, I did not intentionally set out to use trees as imagery and was not initially aware of their significance to me. Over time, looking at my work overall, it became clear that trees symbolized a variety of personal meanings. At times, the trees were self-portraits; they took on myself in certain settings. For example, when I created Dos Palmeras, I didn’t think about the relationship of those two trees together, the way their fronds interconnected. But later, I realized that the trees represented relationships that were going on in my life at the time. Further, I have learned from my work and reading that trees are a very important part of the human existence. They give us food, shelter, energy for heating, paper for writing, and contribute to many other aspects of our daily lives. Yet, we are endlessly destroying them, in the rain forests, in North America, all over the world. They deserve our reverence. I am also very inspired by [Piet] Mondrian. I especially love his early work—he was very much interested in landscape imagery early in his career, and then he became heavily focused on
trees for a period of time.
MM: And then he took the trees and abstracted them.
DSH: Yes, then he abstracted the trees and there was a transitional period, where realist imagery of trees became more abstract. Then of course he got all the way to this piece here. Broadway Boogie Woogie is somewhere around here. [Points to collage image of Broadway Boogie Woogie on wall] That one.
MM: What prompted your print, Homage, honoring Rembrandt?
DSH: Rembrandt created a print called The Little Shell. He did not make a lot of imagery that was based on still life. That print is unique in his work. The intimacy of that shell, its delicacy and nuance, always appealed to me from the very first time I saw the print. I loved the movement, the way the shell sort of starts out in one point, grows and evolves out. Many artists have created homages to the print, but usually they’ve created other shells. When I picked up this pine cone, which had fallen from a tree in my yard [Smith-Harrison shows me a large pine cone sitting on the kitchen window ledge], the spirals reminded me of Rembrandt’s Shell. I really wanted to do an homage to Rembrandt’s print without slavishly copying the motif and the subject matter. Because of my obsession with trees, I decided to use the spiraling quality of the pine cone, and the lights and darks of the shell. While my background composition and the placement of the pine cone is very close to copying Rembrandt’s composition, my use of a pine cone is very different. By creating a homage, I am tipping my hat, having a dialogue with Rembrandt.
MM: Let’s talk about chiaroscuro works of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Do they inform your work or inspire you?
DSH: Oh, yes. Chiaroscuro uses darks, midtones, highlights, and the interpretation of light to create a sense
of volume. See this plate right here that I’m working on? It has the basics of chiaroscuro. There is an aquatinted tone on it already, so the background of the plate is gray. These lines here are going to be dark; I will etch them on the gray background, and then after I etch the plate, I’m going to burnish the highlights. I will pull the highlights of the rose out of the gray tone on that plate. Interestingly, chiaroscuro wasn’t just for woodcuts. During the Renaissance, artists used chiaroscuro to create ornamentation on houses, to decorate facades. Using chiaroscuro, they made what was essentially a painted image look like a sculpted one. For example [pointing to picture in a book], this was ornamentation on a house. It looks sculpted, but it’s a painted image. The excellent use of midtones, highlights, and darks creates volume and tricks the eye. It was painted to create an illusion.
MM: What are your thoughts on contemporary print work that’s not representational or figurative, but swaths of colors or shapes, without line work?
DSH: I respect and am drawn to the very best of modern art. I really love modern artwork, as much as I love the work of the Old Masters, where the figurative realist imagery is more apparent. I very much admire the work of Paulson Press and Crown Point Press, as well as the artists who work there. Many of them may have as much influence of realism as I do, but the end result is different. Their shapes, colors, and forms could be as equally inspired by landscape elements, the human figure, or historically by what other artists have done. But they choose what works for them, what excites their minds, and what gives energy to their work.
MM: How about the work of Chuck Close?
DSH: He’s an incredible draftsman. He can draw circles around the best of us. I love the scale of his work. I admire how he plays with a digitized image’s influence on the human experience; it’s great. For color and shape, there are many California artists, of course. I love Nathan Oliveira and Richard Diebenkorn. Much of Diebenkorn’s work is inspired by landscape, even though his work is abstracted and the elements don’t appear specifically related to landscape elements. I am very fond of many others, including Antonio Lopez-Garcia in Spain, Odd Nerdrum in Norway, and Eric Desmazières in Paris. It’s hard to isolate any one particular artist because I admire so many, and there may be artists that I don’t yet know.
MM: What are your thoughts on the computer as a matrix?
DSH: Some of our very best artists are using the computer as an artistic tool. Not in a formulaic way; they recognize it as an artistic creative tool. As far as the final output, I’m more attracted to computer generated imagery when the output ends up being a film process, such as animation or film, where you see it on the screen. I feel that the luminosity of the lighted screen generally presents pixels at their best. If the computer is used as a reproductive process, simply reproducing a painting, I’m less drawn to it. When it is used as the output process for the artistic manipulation of pixels by an artist who’s very talented with this work, it is beautiful, terrific artwork. Actually, I’m very attracted to digital work itself, digital photography. I enjoy taking photos of flowers from my garden and emailing them to my friends.
MM: Yes, thank you. The last one was gorgeous, especially against the background.
DSH: That flower was in front of this painting. Do you know how many photographs I took? About thirty! One can do this because shooting digitally is so cheap compared to traditional film. When I’m feeling inspired, I often take two hundred shots a day. I’ll show you the variations so you’ll see that I moved the flower into several locations, even in front of that painting. Also, I photographed it at different times of the day, and as the petals faded and fell off.
MM: It strikes me that your artwork grows from a complex interweave of artistic inspirations and subconscious connections, personal experiences, and meticulous hard work. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to include a short synopsis of this background story with each of your images? Say, in a gallery show, so that viewers could catch a glimpse of this richness?
DSH: Yes, you are correct, but I am not sure that it is necessary for viewers to know my story. Creating is a process of self-discovery, learning about my own individual motivations, my journey, and my purpose. There is depth and history underlying my images— it’s not just the initial surface representation, it’s everything that has gone on both in my life as an artist before creating that piece, as well as what’s taking place while it’s being created. Yet viewers will bring their own set of experiences to my work. They don’t have to know what the piece meant to me. Hopefully they will discover something universal, find some poetic depth that will grab hold of their experiences, makes the work meaningful to them.
MM: It has been a great pleasure to listen to your thoughts and absorb the rich ambience created by your collage work, wonderful gardens, your completed artwork and your works in progress. Any thoughts on your place in the history of art?
DSH: I’m excited about how my work might relate to artwork of the past as well as art that may be created five hundred years from now. I am now at the midpoint of my career; hopefully I will have endless amounts of energy to take advantage of the numerous images that continually develop in my mind. Of course, the greatest art in the world is timeless. I hope somehow to create a small niche in the world’s great artwork, a niche that will draw the respect of other artists, inspire other people to appreciate art in general, or learn to see. It’s the archetypal nature of subject matter that I’m drawn to. There may be something archetypal in my work that is not yet obvious, but will be meaningful to future generations. I don’t consciously choose certain themes, and I realize that what I’m doing is not necessarily new. But I’m hoping that I might be able to add one little increment of view to the great archetypal advancement of art. My work is very much about synthesis. Synthesis of everything that is the best of the past, and the best of the current, and hopefully envisioning the best of the future.
