Age: 54
Occupation: Professor of painting, LSU
Hometown: Yarmouth, Mass.
Perhaps The Road, the eerie, apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel that inspired Ed Smith’s latest series of paintings, is around here somewhere.
Stacks of books are everywhere—fodder for the linseed and turpentine creatures that wheel out of Smith’s mind and down his arm onto canvas.
He’s a storyteller with color. And the tales, sometimes haunting, are catching on. He was recently featured in Garden & Gun magazine.
“The truth of the matter is, I come here, and I make things up,” Smith says with a chuckle, his elbow resting by a dozen different colors that escape naming.
Smith’s been on a bit of a bird kick.
So if you’re looking for a folio of Audubon images at the LSU Library, skip it and come straight to Smith’s studio.
The room is perched high in the Art Building. Bill Callahan’s guitar riffs rise into the rafters, his voice a rough flute.
There’s a bird on the canvas now.
Stay restless, creature.
Smith might paint over your feathers in the morning.
Even after a piece of work’s been hung up in a show and discussed by potential art buyers at Soren Christensen Gallery in New Orleans, Smith could suddenly bring it back up here and cover it over with another thick layer of paint.
Even then, the medium will shift south. Oil doesn’t dry for decades, Smith explains.
Audubon shot the birds he illustrated. In Smith’s world they are safe, though they sometimes appear crushed and competing on the page.
Perturbation is Smith’s natural language. When he mixes his vibrant tints, he’s not always thinking about creation.
“I love looking at a house they are knocking down,” he says. “If you look at these chemical plants, get them in the right light, they can be beautiful.”
How industry and hundreds of species of hollow-boned, flying muses live side by side in the Capital City compels him. Is it possible?
He lets the difficult questions fight it out, in indelible hues, by the flock, in the confines of his colorful compositions.
