On the Art of Durrell Smith: A Few Preliminary Notes; Plus a Handful of Side Notes and Meditative Reflections on the Topic of Nature, Culture, Art, Artist, and Critic
By Jerry Cullum
Freelance critic and writer
Durrell Smith’s art is an intriguing blend of the social and the elemental. It’s not that he sets out to produce theory-laden blends of culture and nature; it’s that being honest to one’s own circumstances and the natural things woven into our circumstances and our surroundings produces that blend.
Take, as one example, the monarch butterfly in “Monarch 444,” a mixed media work produced in homage to Smith’s marriage to his wife Ashley on October 4, 2018, or the floral wedding crown in “For My Daughter,” which is only one part of a complex homage that also includes flowers that symbolized the joys of a marriage and a birth, flowers that lived far beyond their normal span and remain natural objects fit for incorporation into an artwork. The dialectic between the personal and the botanical is deeper than a superficial viewing might reveal, even though the artwork itself is a deeply satisfying experience.
In fact, Smith’s assemblages work well on purely aesthetic levels, but become transformed by the addition of narrative. In like fashion, an independent strand of Smith’s artmaking, works in various media depicting bird dogs and the birds with which they are associated, reflect a serious involvement with the raising and training of bird dogs as well as a hands-in involvement with quail hunting, activities not stereotypically associated with African-Americans, artists or not. This piece of information transforms, on one significant level, representational artwork that might otherwise be fitted comfortably into a familiar category of genre art that has its own rules and its own expectations, which Smith both respects and stretches in his own approach to the genre.
Smith’s assemblage work incorporates an acknowledged debt of inspiration to the example of Thornton Dial, whose capacity for creative symbolism based on found and repurposed objects was legendary by the time of the Alabama artist’s death. But Smith comes from a strikingly different set of circumstances, and while these are not intrinsically relevant to his artwork itself, they shed light on the degree to which an artist’s identification as African-American in the contemporary artworld brings with it its own set of implicit expectations that it is the task of the artist to modify or deny in the search for genuine expressions of personal identity. All human beings (however difficult “all” has lately become as an assertion) arrive in life surrounded by clouds or cobwebs of socially inflected mythology, but African-American artists have been even more deeply immersed in this unwilled miasma of myth than have most artists identified or self-identified as white. It is to Smith’s credit that he has navigated this difficult terrain so unselfconsciously. His work affirms his own particular identity and his situatedness in American art even as he engages in, to quote the title of one of his assemblages, “Breakin Traditions Evry Mornin.” The work explores the terrain but does not direct the viewer. We are free to find as much or as little as our own past experience and present perception makes us inclined to make possible. There is a great deal there to be found, however, whether we as viewers choose to find it or not, and the subtleties of palette and occasional imagery provide a great deal of visual pleasure to encourage the viewer’s work of investigation. There is immediate delight and subsequent reward to be discovered.
His capacity to continue in this vein intrigues me deeply. We live in times of sudden, unanticipated fluidity, and the inchoate structures implied by his overall body of still evolving work gives me grounds for hope that his unique breadth of past and present experience will give rise to fresh insights that speak to our collective condition while remaining true to his own personal voice. But it is not for me to impose any expectations or conditions; the task of the critic, subject always to the limitations of the critic’s own past and present experiences, is to discern as clearly as possible the past, present and possible future of an artist and an artist’s body of work. And with Smith as with so many other artists, I have only begun to discern the lineaments of a deeply complex and deeply fascinating present path and future direction.