At all times, there’s a “nagging voice in my head saying, ‘This might be a disaster.’”
Smith grew up far away from all that, in the small Northern California town of Arcata, Population: 18,000. His parents owned a mom-and-pop bicycle shop and lived on an apple orchard. It was by all accounts an idyllic childhood, save for the lack of arts education and culture up north, where much of the economy revolved around growing and selling marijuana.
“That was the only problem really,” Smith says. “I went to a small public school, and there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure for creative development.”
But Smith’s parents were wise. Early on, they tuned into the fact that Smith enjoyed making art—and that he was good at it. “As soon as I could hold a pencil, it was what I wanted to do,” Smith says. Smith admits he “could get corny” about his artistic beginnings. There was “never any sort of pivotal moment” in which he discovered, “Aha! I am Artist!” But there were dribbles of encouragement and glee.
He remembers screwing around at a friend’s house and asking for a pen and pencil. His friend didn’t want to scribble, but his mom yelled at him and said, “Get him some paper and pencils! He’s going to be a famous artist one day.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh jeez, I got to make that come true.’”
Before that friend’s mother died a few years ago, Smith told her the story, which she’d long
forgotten, crediting her, “You may be responsible for the trajectory I’m on.”
It’s little moments like these that arguably make the artist. But it’s also an alchemical force that can’t be entirely explained by human language. Did Smith become an artist because he was good at art? Or did he become an artist because he thought he was good at it? Sometimes, when we grow up thinking we are made for one destiny, the other paths fall away quickly. Had Smith grown thinking he was made to be a carpenter or a tech CEO or a florist, might his path have changed? The natural skills of the child—both a curse and a blessing—often pave our yellow brick roads.
Given his youthful instincts, Smith did what he thought he needed to do: go to graduate school for painting. But after the first year and the “fiftieth devastating critique,” the tides changed. Professors actually came to his studio and said, “You should not be painting.”
It wasn’t that he wasn’t good at painting. He was technically skilled. But he didn’t have anything to say. “I think when one has too many technical facilities, they rely on them in a knee-jerk, automatic way and don’t deeply consider what they’re doing,” Smith says. “There’s no struggle, no risk.”
For Smith, the work he finds himself most drawn to is that in which a “real gamble was made,” that professes “real struggle.” At all times, there’s a “nagging voice in my head saying, ‘This might be a disaster.’”
He decided to take a different direction. Instead of painting, he used the models he painted from for his show—and asked his friends and collaborators to contribute to paintings based off the models. It was his senior thesis show when things finally clicked.
“That sort of has informed the rest of my practice,” he says. “A lot of the work in my exhibitions are not actually fabricated by me. I work, to some degree, in a collaborative nature for most everything I do.”
Let’s get back to Crush, Smith’s smooshed sculptures. Inspired by a year abroad in Italy and “absorbed by osmosis”—they begin as raw marble, cut from a quarry in Carrara, a city in Italy famed for its blue-gray marble.
If you think about it in a sort of cyclical way, [my sculptures] are kind of going back to where they came from.”
