Smith finds gallery, and grace

Published 11:00 am Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Elizabeth Smith’s works are the debut exhibit at the Gallery at Grace Church.When Grace Episcopal Church was built four years ago, it was sited to be in harmony with the natural world.

Now, a new church gallery opens with a show that brings the grace of the natural world indoors. Artist Elizabeth Smith’s images of trees are the debut exhibition for the Gallery at Grace.

Smith, who moved to the Pacific Northwest from her native England, creates tree images by combining digital manipulation of photographs with color washes and ink drawing. In works like her “Moonlight Sonata,” a seeming tangle of twisted branches resolves into a sinuous pattern.

“When people ask me why I like trees, I tell them I love the structure, the design of the tree,” she said, “how the larger branch is reflected in the smaller branch and goes out and out and out until it disappears. Creating that is the ultimate draftsmanship for me.”

Smith grew up in a small town in the south of England. After a sojourn in London, she and her husband moved to the Cornwall countryside. It was then that Smith began sketching trees.

“I just suddenly took to drawing trees,” she said. “It didn’t come through study. I’m not a scientific illustrator. I’m not someone who has botanical training. They just happened.”

For a quarter-century, Smith’s medium was pen and ink. She loved fine detail; she even drew with the underside of the quill pen’s nib to get the finest line.

Then eye surgery destroyed part of her optic nerve. The artist could see to draw, but lost her depth perception; she couldn’t tell when the pen was going to make contact with the paper.

Smith knew she had to do find a way to combine the pen and ink she loved with something “a little bit more forgiving.” She began to alter photographs in Photoshop, fading them.

She then used the blurry photograph as a template, outlining form in ink to re-emphasize certain parts of the image.

Smith soon found that the technique she’d developed to substitute for the fine detail she could no longer create had aesthetic qualities that strengthened her work. Fading the photograph simplified the image. Inking back in, emphasized the substructure of the pattern of interlacing branches.

Smith also began to use color for the background, laying on acrylic and translucent ink washes. The result was that the negative spaces between objects – here, tree branches – were emphasized.

The change in her work has been paralleled by a change in the artist.

“I think what has changed dramatically in me is an emotional change,” Smith said. “I’m starting to see color. Before, all that mattered was draftsmanship – the line. Now, in my life, and in my furnishings in my home and in my dress and in the landscape, I see color. It has been quite startling, because for 25 years I did black and white; I never dreamt I would go anywhere else.”

Smith’s use of color is subtle, and her delicate, restrained images are well-suited to the walls of Grace Church.

In fact, gallery director Ann Strickland, who doubles as Grace’s music director, notes that Smith’s work played a part in the decision to dedicate Grace Church walls to visual art.

In April 2005, Strickland used Smith’s images to enhance a mass based on the poetry of Mary Oliver.

“(Her) work has roots in nature,” Strickland said, “and so I saw that Elizabeth’s work could be a vital part of it. I wanted to display the art and use it in the program, so we created an exhibit. We saw the beauty of that, and the way it worked in the space.”

Smith agrees that Grace Church – a building whose focal point, visible through the large wall of glass directly behind the nave, is a giant maple tree – is a fine venue.

“To exhibit in this building is a wonderful thing,” she said.