Works by the late Sam Wilson at the University of Utah’s Gittins Gallery. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Tony Smith and Sam Wilson—both men had other names they rarely or never used—died at almost the same time a year ago. The University of Utah, where they taught during what history will almost certainly record as its greatest half century, has mounted a too-brief, two-master exhibition of too-few of their works.

Tony and Sam are remembered these days primarily for their teaching: both men produced enormous numbers of exemplary art works that they didn’t hesitate to use as examples to encourage, rather than intimidate, their students, from whom they expected much. Sam, who worked into his final year, showed regularly, so his art was as familiar as his visage, which was one of the favorite subjects of his teasing manner, which was as visually punning as his titles were in words. Tony, though, retired from teaching in 2001 and took the occasion to swear off serious painting, which had landed him in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Gallery. While it’s great to be admired on the East Coast, those distant achievements, combined with his voluntary absence from the local gallery scene, made him something of a mystery in his homeland. The archive of 15 Bytes has much to say about both men and Sam’s art, but it’s time to reflect on what enabled Tony’s art to capture and hold the attention of so many art lovers’ eyes.

The most revealing spot in the Gittins Gallery belongs to a painting Tony titled “How God and I Created the World.” To get Tony’s meaning right, it might help to realize that there are actually two worlds, though we are to understand that most of us mistake them for one. There’s the world we live in, and there’s the world of art, which most people take as a copy of the real world. Tony’s point, and this applies equally to Sam Wilson, was that the artist creates a complete, and completely separate, world in parallel to that one. Sculptors used to boast that while painters make pictures of things, sculptors make things. Well put, except that it’s not true. To bring home his point, Tony rarely painted anything exactly as he could paint it and viewers expected to see it. He wasn’t being ornery, or only ornery: he was showing off how well he could reproduce the look of real things, but reminding us that we were seeing his magical powers just as much as God’s, or Nature’s, or your pick of who or what is responsible for this untidy, even chaotic world.

Tony Smith, “How God and I Created the World”

 

Tony Smith, “Jelly Roll”

Here are some lessons Tony is sharing in this small masterpiece. Michelangelo showed God creating with a fingertip, with which he imparts to Adam the spark of life. Tony seems to prefer a slingshot, a mechanism he complicates enough to suggest that accidents—ineptitude, even—might play as big a role as divine preference. Creativity on this level often requires making a choice which of two good, but mutually exclusive, ideas to go with. Tony’s world allows him to keep both, frequently through the simple device of making a hole in the image like the oval in the lower middle that alternates as a circular hole seen at an angle, which leads into another, simultaneous space. In an upper corner a spiral goes on turning despite being interrupted by blue shards that recede, as blue usually does, into the background. There’s a good deal of Romantic, 19th-century American landscape across the middle distance, accompanied by a lesson in either Transcendentalism or Asian mysticism that sees the yellow glow from the forked stick illuminate a tree branch that emits the first of several multi-colored whiffs of smoke that pass like the essence of life from one thing to another, forming an arc that passes over a heart and a ball, all immaculately depicted. Tony loved spheres and circles, and their presence in so many of his works is like the timbre of your favorite singer’s voice: an infinitely malleable signature.

Tony came of age in the era of Pop art, which supposedly celebrated mundane consumer goods and sought to level the social hierarchy. Tony knew better. As the subtitle of his pictorial autobiography (FINALLY, a book about me) suggests, he knew all along that while anyone could see the illusionary solid objects and empty space he knew how to carve into a flat surface with his pencils, markers, and brushes, very few of them could duplicate the magic, let alone show off his inherent skill. In “Jelly Roll,” he makes his point over and again, capping it by slicing through the dripping jelly to reveal, inside it, a slice of starry outer space. The image of the artist trying humbly to show that rich and poor alike drink Coke gives way to the realization that reality is far more vast and miraculous than our five senses can reveal, though some among us are plugged into its electric circuit, making it their plaything and enabling them to show us more of it than we can see with our mortal eyes.

Works by Tony Smith at the Gittins Gallery. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

 

Tony Smith, “The Big Tiny” (detail)

After he gave up teaching at U of U, Tony renounced the unavoidable competition that is as much a part of teaching art as “publish or perish” is of academics in general. Like another famous artist, Hokusai, whose late-in-life name change allowed him to point out that he was an “old man, mad about drawing,” Tony would spend the rest of his life sharing-by-teaching-casually and drawing every day, usually in the company of his sons. There’s probably an entire generation of Utahns who know him best from a single work done in this time. “The Big Tiny” was shown in the fourth floor gallery of the City Library in January of 2016, at which time it hovered between his fans’ desire to elevate it to iconic stature and his own choice to bring it down to earth with a device that allowed viewers to point out their evaluation by rotating a pointer. Probably not everyone who saw it realized that it was, in fact, a drawing: one that over the course of a year he added to and revised as it grew deeper and denser. As the other bookend to go with Tony’s image of creation, this one foregoes the chance to imagine the world’s end, and its place creates the chance for someone who loved that creation, as the saying goes, “not wisely but too well,” to put that down in living color.

Tony Smith & Sam Wilson, Gittins Gallery, University of Utah, through Nov.1

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.