Molly Smith

Molly Smith (b. 1976, Kansas City, MO) has lived in the rural hills of western Massachusetts homesteading and creating the matter of her daily life as long as she lived in New York City where she pursued an art career. Smith received a BFA in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA at Columbia University. Living in NYC, Smith showed her work for thirteen years and was represented by Kerry Schuss and Kate Werble. She has taught art at a K-8 school and at universities including Hampshire College, Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Maryland Institute College of Art. Smith moved to Massachusetts in 2013 and helped her partner build their dwellings, learned to raise their own food, and has been homeschooling her two children.

Drawing upon the nature she is surrounded by as well as the processes and stuff of her daily work, Smith records the beauty and awe she sees in drawings, paintings and sculptures. As an artist, Smith believes in working with what you've got and transforming materials in simple and inventive ways.

In Conversation with Friday Arts

Friday Arts

Tell us about your practice and process.

Molly Smith

I have kept a slow but steady practice during a ten year hiatus from being a dedicated artist. That has always included nature, from memory or wholly as views out windows of my rural dwellings. I've worked in watercolor, ink, charcoal and graphite to both paint and draw what surrounds me. I sometimes work directly from the natural reference - a tree, the sky or the ridge line of the hill of the valley I live in, or from memories collected of the stream, the woods or the snow taken from a walk or a glance out the window. Working from memory and more than that, a deeper knowing, has always been something I've strived for as an artist.

After thirteen years of living in a rural landscape, I finally feel that I can do that fairly confidently in my landscape work. I know how the shadow fills a cloud or how the branches of a maple versus an ash tree grow. I feel I can piece together and layer the landscape in a way that reflects my familiarity with it. I like to work in stages, laying in the background in a wash, then building up branches or the forest on top until enough has accumulated to simulate reality. It's a type of focusing, starting with the wide view and then honing into the sharp, small details.

What themes/ideas do you find yourself continuing to return to over time?

I return to the landscape and nature. Within that, it's what I find beautiful there. It might be a moment in the way light behaves in a rising moon or a shadow cast on snow. It could be the color of a sunset or dusk in summer. I seek to represent the supreme excellence of nature in the symmetry of a fern or a reflection in water. What I represent again and again is what moves me in my surroundings that I want to capture and show to others.

How do you think about place in relation to your work?

Place is the main subject in my work and has transformed over the past three decades that the landscape has been in my paintings. I began with longing for nature, working from images of other people's travels. I then moved to working from my own images, but from nature cropped from city landscapes—in the parks or above buildings and power lines. Now I live immersed in the nature I represent and often work without images but from memory and daily views of the landscape that surrounds me.

How you approach the natural world in this moment of climate disruption?

I see the natural world as having a divine perfection. It is a system whole unto itself. When I lived in the city, my work showed the human influence on nature, but after living and working closely with natural ecosystems through practicing regenerative farming, I respect a greater wisdom and resilience in nature and don't feel the need to include or comment on it in my work now.

Tell us about the process of making When.

I wanted to make a monumental work in honor of my unborn child, both to remember the time before I knew them and also to give focus to my time of pregnancy and birth. I had fallen in love with Iron Gall ink that an artist friend gave me from a trip to London and wanted to work with it on a large scale and over time, as it changes with age. The deep blue color (which has since oxidized) lent itself to an image of the sky, so that was to be my subject. I had worked on large mural sized pieces and on long scrolls before so that was the format - it allowed me to keep just a little bit out at a time as I worked in a very small cabin with a toddler and my partner - while achieving a larger piece. I worked in a way I always have in landscape paintings representing clouds and moons, creating them by painting around the negative space. I worked intuitively, painting without a plan, and giving in to the unpredictable nature of the medium. This is more like the way I worked in sculpture, using plaster and handmade paper, than I tended to before in painting.

Tell us about making ink from oak galls and your history of using pigments from natural sources?

I wish I had done it myself, but as I mentioned, the ink was gifted to me and I even had another artist friend pick up another bottle for me when she was in London, at some point during working on the piece. Another friend just gifted me a locally made bottle of the ink in the last few years, knowing nothing of my connection to it and my mother in law also gave me a book with the recipe a few years ago. It's not that difficult, except for the collecting of enough oak galls. The trees in the forest surrounding me are a bit too tall to collect, but I'm going to start keeping my eyes peeled in coming seasons!

Do you think of the small watercolors as diaristic?

That project was making one a day for a year, so they recorded whatever caught my eye on a particular day in a specific moment.

Are there artists who you think your work is in conversation with?

I'd like to think that it is with those whose work I respect, such as Charles Burchfield, Vija Celmins, Dike Blair, Siobhan Liddell, Tom Fairs, Thomas Hart Benton, Emily Carr, Georgia O'Keefe, Frederic Edwin Church, J.M.W. Turner. Also, my work is in very direct conversation with my late mother's, Harriet Twitty Smith.

What are your thoughts on the role of art and artists today, at this particular moment in time?

I think that artists have the ability to invite people to step out of the expected rhythms and roles of their everyday. For me, right now, this means leaving behind the worldly discussions of politics and current events and all that entails. I'm looking to find solace in nature, to see the everlasting truths that the natural world reveals, and to be surrounded by deep beauty which connects me to creation in its most profound forms.