Doug Smith is a Utah native whose credentials include degrees from both the U of U and BYU. While his design work and painting are familiar to people in at least 22 states, he shows consistently at Salt Lake City’s 15th Street Gallery, which is well known for showing only artists with an unquestionable Utah connection. Smith works in several related mediums, but is best known for encaustic painting, a combination of beeswax and resin colored with an array of pigments, which, unlike most encaustic artists, he fuses with a torch. The result has a quality unique to him, ranging from surface marks that resemble the drips and scribbles of expressionism to deep surface relief that feels natural to the medium, but in fact is all but unique. His approach initially appears to lie in abstraction, as his background in design might naturally have led him to. Yet like so many Utah artists, his abstracts draw every bit as much on natural subjects as they do pure design. Elements of the West find their way into every work, implying the weathered sides of sun-dashed or rain-streaked buildings, the sky in its many moods, and the forcefulness of exposure to the elements. Much of this remains unspoken, yet they are clear presences in his dramatic and scarred panels.
Of the 20 new works currently on display at 15th Street, the piece with the most bas-relief sculptural quality is also among the most candidly representational. “In the Meadow” features a single tree, as might survive despite its exposure, surrounded by space and grass. It is also seen through what could be a torrential downpour that blurs the viewer’s vision, even as it softens the elemental colors of whatever surrounds the subject. In fact, much of the background is implied by the foreground—by the colors embedded in the 12 to 20 layers of wax and resin that the artist has built up, by a process he wisely keeps to himself, in the deep rivulets that suggest the erosion such a rainfall might produce.
The versatility Smith brings to this technique is on display in “Rag Rug,” in which the surface is pitted and fused over, rather than open and suggestive of gravity. This also has one of the traditional virtues of other forms of painting: while the close-up image reveals the presence of the artist’s technique, upon backing away its subject matter and domestic references become visible.
Douglas Smith, “Rag Rug”
Douglas Smith, “Ancient Text”
A window into the artist’s personal interests opens in “Ancient Text,” which also reminds us that encaustics permit techniques that simply wouldn’t work in most media. Here a text in Kanji on hand-made paper has been embedded in the material of the painting. Kanji, which is Japanese language written in Chinese characters and is often used for meditative inscriptions that the writer wishes to look as significant as what they say and how they sound, blends with the aged and worn look of the encaustic to make a striking totality that expresses much even to those who cannot read it, yet who feel something universal in the hand-brushed letter forms.
Not far from old Japan, Smith also invokes Xinhua, which means “new China.” “Xinhua Trail,” however, suggests the effect of a new culture overlaid on the remains of older ones. In places the crazed surface of old pottery seem to underlie the same sort of writing as “Ancient Text” contains, though more thoroughly lost in a surface smeared with a white, paint-like paste in which what could be bootprints can be seen. Doug Smith is interested in the different functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain, which in addition to their contrasting concerns also control the opposite sides of the body. Left is largely verbal and specific and controls the mostly dominant right side of the body; right brain is creative and intuitive and controls the left side, which is often dominant in artists. “Xinhua Trail” suggests this ancient contrast in the way the layers that are always an important part of the encaustic image have largely divided the panel into opposing corners that sometimes seem to struggle and even force themselves on each other. At the same time—and this is so typical of Smith’s way of including layered meanings in his multi-coated medium—the suggestion of a culture that has weathered many changes over the years also conveys the look of a wall, say, that has suffered combative usage over the same tracts of time.
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- “Charm Bracelet”
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- “In the Meadow”
Encaustic is surely the oldest painting technique still in use, and has gained significant popularity since it was reintroduced to the public in the 20th century. Doug Smith is one of its most innovative and expressive proponents, and so it comes as no surprise that his background is rooted in Utah, nor that he can be encountered most fully at 15th Street Gallery. Where else does a local hero find wall space for 20 works of art? Works that should not be taken for granted, but wait to be seen and appreciated.
Douglas Smith and Anne Becker, 15th Street Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Mar. 13
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Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.
Categories: Exhibition Reviews | Visual Arts
