Hank Smith is a terrible hunter and awful at fishing, he says. “Usually, by the end of the day, I just end up bringing back ideas for paintings.”
Of course, that hasn’t stopped him from climbing into boats and blinds, for what could be more productive than finding inspiration?
Most recently, for the past year or so, he’s found himself on the Ghost River and Wapanocca, called to the wetlands of Memphis. He’s paddled, kayaked, hiked, sat, listened, and watched. He’s sometimes whipped out the camera to capture an image, but he’s not there to capture a specific moment, but a feeling — something intangible but undoubtedly recognizable. This would make for the foundation of his latest series of paintings, set to be displayed in “SWAMP: A Meditation on Self and Silt” at Ugly Art Co.
For the show, Smith tried to get out to the wetlands in the area every other week for a while there. He read up on the area and on swamps, picking up an old favorite of his, Contentious Terrains: Boglands, Ireland, Postcolonial Gothic by Derek Gladwin. Learning about the land and and its history is integral to his art, he says — to gleaning out that feeling among the flora and the fauna.
“I don’t really think of [myself as] being a landscape painter,” Smith says, though his show will feature landscapes and close-up visuals of what makes it. “I’m more so thinking about the people and interconnectedness between nature and myself or humanity in general. It’s more like a portraiture thing.”
The wetlands, or the swamps — whatever you want to call them — are “an alternative place,” Smith says, “where time doesn’t necessarily cease to exist, but time becomes more fluid. You can … kind of take things out of the moment. It’s like a way to meditate on where your place is in the interconnectedness between humanity, nature, our culture, our history, the past and future, just by the just the sheer physical reality of swamp, which blew my mind, because it’s kind of a place that’s constantly living and dying. It’s consuming itself but also rebirthing itself. It takes things and it cleans them, and then it gives it back to the world and gives it back to us.”
It’s also a place of refuge, historically. “I’m from Virginia originally, and I was obsessed with the Great Dismal Swamp which always served as a place for the lost, the desperadoes,” Smith says. “I kind of saw that repeated in different places through the South, where the swamps were this place of escape from political, racial, financial, all these other troubles. The swamp kind of serves as a place of protection and also a place of danger.”
In turn, with all these tensions, the swamp becomes a place rife for introspection, a place to look out and to look in. “To me,” Smith says, “it is a very interesting landscape that very quickly breaks that wall between us as humans and nature because you have to interact with it. Once you step in, you gotta be looking where you’re stepping. It’s changing every time you’re there. It’s a place of active growth and thinking. … As an artist, and also in my personal life, I felt that progression kind of reflected in the art.”
Smith had never really painted water before, for instance, so that was something he had to learn with this project. For the most part, he’s a self-taught artist, having taken a few classes here and there and not accepting his fate as a professional artist until his return to Memphis post-pandemic when Ugly Art Co. accepted him as a member of its collective. (Smith had gone to Rhodes College and left the city after he graduated.) “Those previous days, I was not really showing anybody [my art] but my wife, some family members, and whoever was interested,” he says. “Now I am no longer just painting in a basement for myself but am able to go out there and show other people. I think having Ugly grounded and joining that has been like a massive motivator. … In general, I think that Memphis is such an inspiring place.”
And, Smith says, Memphis has been a supportive place. “My favorite thing is when people look at a piece and it means something to them,” he says. “I guess my hope when someone looks at one of my paintings is not that they get what I’m thinking but that they did something out of it.”
Always, though, even when he didn’t have an audience, he’s been painting, drawing, and doodling, and always, he’s been called to the land. “Growing up in the mountains with a strong familial connection to Appalachia produced a strong emphasis on place and connection to the land,” he says. “How we mark it and how it marks us, and how it serves as a convergence of time, memory, and history, both personal and cultural.”
With that in mind, for this show, Smith has partnered with the Wolf River Conservancy. “We wanted to highlight that connection between art and conservation,” he says. “There’s nothing sadder than when you try to paint something and it goes away.”
The conservancy’s executive director Erik Houston will be a part of the artist’s talk with Smith at the “SWAMP”’s opening reception on Friday, May 30th, 5:30 p.m. Bar Liminia will provide cocktails, and there will be live music by Too Small.