Dean Smith

environment #48, 2021, collage of found illustrations, 5 x 4 15/16 inches, [private collection]

MS: I’ve been really interested in your work for a while now. So, it's a real pleasure to get to do a feature on volume with you.

DS: Thank you. I'm very pleased to be invited and enjoy your work as well. Thanks so much.

MS: So, because we've never spoke, maybe you could tell me just a little bit about your general biography, where you're from, where you went to school, that stuff?

DS: Yeah. I was born in Oakland, California, and where I'm living currently. I have lived in the Bay Area for most of my life, except for two years up in the Sierra foothills where my parents had built a house and I finished high school. But then I came back down to go to UC Berkeley, where I got my bachelors, actually double bachelors, in the practice of art and the history of art and then proceeded to get my MFA at UC Berkeley as well. I focused on painting, although I haven't painted since 1998. Around 1997 drawing started to dominate my practice.

MS: That sounds very familiar. We'll definitely talk more about that. My evolution was really similar. How did you find your way into visual art? Did you grow up around visual art or other forms of creativity? Was it familiar territory for you, or was it unexpected?

DS: I think for my parents, certainly my mother, it was unexpected I would move in that direction. Certainly not what they wanted me to study when I went to Berkeley. Though creativity has been a part of my family. My grandmother, on my mom's side, painted for a long time in the 1960s-70s. And my father should have been a wood worker. He had amazing woodworking and wood carving skills. Unfortunately, he really didn't have a vision he could make a life of that. But his attention to craft really stuck with me. Not long before he died, he made a studio visit back when I was painting, and he made a comment about how the edge of the canvas had too much paint drippings on it and how distracting that was for him visually. I didn't expect him to be that attentive which caught me by surprise, and I really considered his comment, because at that point my painting was moving in a direction where taping the edges and keeping them clean made sense.

In high school, I was deeply into photography and had a dark room. I was actually interested in moving into fashion photography, of all things. I wanted to go to the Brooks Institute of Photography, to which my parents resoundingly said no. I went to Berkeley and then ended up being an art major. They were furious, especially my mother who said, “Well, you're going to have to do something academic along with it.” So, I did a double bachelor's in art history and the practice of art. It ended up taking me five and a half years rather than four; but I had no regrets.

environment #29, 2018, collage of found illustrations, 6 5/8 x 5 7/16 inches

MS: I think that's a terrific path to take. I was telling a friend the other day that a few years after I finished my MFA, I doubled back and started re-reading all of the criticism and theory that we studied. I started to pick up books on modernism and really fill in the gaps in my art history education. I started with basic reading then got more and more specific as I went along. I’m glad to have done it because I don’t think that I really absorbed it during school. I think that having an academic focus alongside of studio is nice because there’s more structure there. The ongoing reading that I do on modern art has really informed my studio practice. Reading about different periods of art history sparks most of the ideas that I have for studio work. Without that engagement, it's hard to keep the ball rolling.

You mentioned photography, and I don't really identify as a photographer, but I do a lot of lens based stuff. I use a camera in all of my art, which is a relatively recent development, within the last five years or so. Now camera work is the catalyst for most everything I make. How did you end up meandering from photography to studio stuff?

DS: I was taking an introductory art course at Berkeley one of those foundational art courses like drawing and composition taught by this visiting faculty member, Giovanni Ragusa, who was fresh from Italy and spoke very little English; though I think he probably spoke better English than he let on. Because of that, communication centered on the visual. It fascinated me how one could communicate purely on a visual level. After that, I wanted to move into a visual art practice that was eye to hand, as it were, rather than mediated by a mechanical object like a camera.

MS: Did you feel that visual communication outside of photography was more effective? Or was there an aspect of handmade art that that you found especially appealing?

DS: I think that was the general appeal -- liking the process of making things, physically making something. And Giovanni was the catalyst for that revelation.

MS: Absolutely. I understand that.

DS: Even when I was a kid, I always loved art classes and always excelled in them. But at that moment in Giovanni's class I realized, oh, I could really make something of a life of this.

MS: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I talk to some folks for whom drawing or painting was just an ever-present part of their life. Then I'll I've talked to other folks who were led to visual art by other interests. I've talked to people who were led to studio art by an interest in architecture, or geography, or history. For them there was an attraction to making things visually based on other academic interests.

Would it be fair to say that yours was half and half? Because it seems like you always had some awareness, having an interest in photography, and you mentioned your dad being into woodworking and stuff like that. Was it a new thing in college when you started to uncover that, or was it familiar territory?

untitled [dsl_68], 2021, graphite on found vintage paper, 10 x 8 inches

DS: That’s a good question. Certainly, photography initially taught me how to look. It was afoundational aspect of what it meant to be observant. And being in the dark room you're watching something transform and become something. It took that catalyst of being in a situation with Giovanni to awaken something, for something that was latent to suddenly rise to the surface. It's like the proverbial light bulb moment. Then at that point, it was like, okay, I'm getting on this train, and I'm going. I'm not sure exactly where this is taking me, but I'm going.

MS: Yeah. It's interesting that you mentioned learning how to look through photography. My experience was the other way around. I learned how to look through drawing and painting. With a background in drawing, the learning curve of photography was pretty steep. I already had a compositional sense and a visual literacy when I moved into photography. The way that I photograph things is completely based on the way that I draw. I haven't talked to a lot of folks who began in photography and then made their way into drawing and painting. That’s cool. Just out of curiosity, you mentioned that you were in the Sierra foothills for a time in your life. What area?

DS: Yeah, in Sonora, which is up in the Gold Rush country. It's the central part of the Sierras. Sonora is like an hour and a half away from Yosemite. I moved up there in ’77. It was very different than it is now. It was quaint back then, and now it's strip malls and not very pleasant.

MS: Yeah. I was out in the Sierras about a month ago. I was up at Bear Valley. It’s incredibly beautiful. I had a blast photographing out there. I could have stayed out there for weeks and photographed. Do you feel like living in that environment shaped your art in any way? For me, land and environment have a huge impact on the things that I make. Do you feel like that area contributed to your artistic development?

DS: I’d have to say yes and no. Yes, in that when I was up there, I was taking photographs of the surrounding environment. But then at the same time, I was taking photographs of models for a jewelry store, which were published in the local paper. At the time I aspired to be a fashion photographer. I had the seamless backdrop, did the set up and the makeup, the whole thing. I was impacted by the film The Eyes of Laura Mars, which was influenced by the fashion photographer, Helmut Newton’s style and attitude. So, yes, I guess it had something to do with the place because I felt so isolated living in a small town. Making these modest fashion photographs a way for me to feel, this may sound silly, cosmopolitan.

MS: Yeah, I can relate to that. I spent the first part of my childhood in Eugene, Oregon, and when I was a freshman in high school my mom and I moved to Medford, Oregon. Medford is in Southern Oregon, about 30 minutes from Northern California. When I was about 16, I started getting interested in art. It makes sense to me now why art was appealing to me as a teenager in a small town. It was connected to the world and generally associated with major cities. It gave me something to identify with.

My grandmother was a painter, and I started out making these landscapes with her when I was just a teenager. Then over time, I started to branch out and learn just a little bit about modernism, started to get curious about that, started to incorporate some of those themes into my own work. I really identified as a painter all the way up through my second year of graduate school. Then I reached this place where I got so stressed about painting that I started to resent it. I had been painting for about 10 years at that point, and I just got sick of it.

In an act of frustration, I started making some small drawings as a side body of work in my studio and was encouraged by the faculty where I went to earn my MFA to move in that direction. Things were much better after that. I felt unburdened by simplifying my materials. Drawing worked much better for me.

When you started to move away from painting what the evolution of that was like?

untitled [dsl_72], 2022, graphite and colored pencil on found vintage paper, 8 5/16 x 6 1/8 inches, [private collection]

DS: In a certain way, similar. I should digress here to say that art department at Berkeley at the time was very painting centric with faculty like Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, and David Simpson. My paintings were gestural at that time. Then when I got out of graduate school, it was a slow development away from that gesturalism. It always takes me a long time to get anywhere [laughs].

I'm a slow learner in certain ways, at least when it comes to making art. I wanted my work to be less emotive, cooler and more reductive. I started making these paintings that were oil and wax on canvas. The paintings were very process-driven and very much about the surface, which ended up being very flat. It was almost like they were extruded from a machine. It was what I considered my first true mature work. I still stand behind those paintings. I think that the paintings were very good. However, I felt like they were somehow a dead end.

I couldn't envision how I could morph them over time because of the process that went into making them was you could only do so much, and then that was it. And as I was hitting this creative wall, I was thinking about a lot of artists that were, and are still of interest to me, who whose work was able to distill a lot of energy in what they created. The artists were Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, and Veja Celmins. At this same time, I went to this show of recent acquisitions at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and included was this tiny 17th century etching of fur muffs by Wenceslaus Hollar. It was incredibly detailed and sensual. It had this almost neutron star-like density to it. Again, the light bulb situation going off.

I literally went back to my studio that day and started making drawings that were just a series of small staccato marks that radiated outwards. The act of drawing just took over--the immediacy of it, the beauty of it. They started off small and then got bigger and bigger. That's how I moved into drawing and left painting behind; from looking at an artwork and then having this revelatory moment. Seeing that etching was a profound catalyst that allowed this shift to happen.

MS: Yeah, I understand that completely. I've got a couple of just things I'm curious about. One, not to jump back too far, and we'll move beyond all the early stuff here in just a little bit. But when you were in graduate school and throughout your early experiences painting, what paintings were you making at the time? You mentioned that they were gestural. Was this an extension of a like, abstract expressionism or other stuff going on there at the time?

DS: Yes, absolutely.

MS: Then at a certain point, you wanted to turn the volume down on that a little bit and make things that were a little bit less emotive.

entrance III, 2013, graphite on paper, 31 1/4 x 25 inches, [private collection]

DS: More reductive and cool. Just much more… The paintings I was making were somewhat biomorphic as well--gestural biomorphic forms. It took me a while being outside of graduate school to find my own voice. I certainly don't regret going through what I went through. It was the necessary steps. But when I discovered this mode of working with oil and wax it was really a happy accident that that made this shift possible, where I felt like I was making something that was really my true sensibility as opposed to a received sensibility.

MS: Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me. When I was in graduate school, my work was often criticized for being overly romantic and moody. I got so tired of hearing that, but that was just how I painted at the time. I think that drawing for me felt like a way out of that. It could be incredibly expressive, but it was developed much slower, where I could work it at this completely different pace. It taught me how to be more precise and decisive.

When I moved away from painting it was such a relief. I just grew tired of facing the same criticism over and over and over again. It was a fair criticism. My paintings at that time were pretty sappy. I caught a lot of flak for that. I'm glad that I did because it was a necessary thing for me to think about and resolve in my own work.

I wouldn't say that that stuff ever completely got drained out of my work. I kept using a lot of the same imagery, but when I started drawing, it changed the approach. It gave it this deadpan character. Still equally as expressive, but in a more slow and calculated way.

I studied lithography as an undergraduate, not as my main focus, but I took several years of it. I was interested in what you brought up about that etching because it seemed to me when I started drawing it had the look of a print. Was there any part printmaking that ever influenced what you were up to outside of that one etching, or was that an isolated thing?

DS: I took a class in printmaking in graduate school. Though, curiously, when I moved into this new mode of drawing, which again was very process-driven just like the paintings, sometimes people would say, “Is this a print?” Or “Have you considered printmaking? This would translate so well.” It's funny how there's a similarity between your experience and my experience of people's reception of the drawings as being somehow either looking like prints or lending themselves to being made as a print.

MS: I never had any interest in really making multiples. So printmaking for me is still something that I'll do because I really love the textures and things that only printmaking can provide me with. But I couldn't care less about making an edition. I would go to an addition printer if I wanted to make a perfect edition. But I do like it as a way to make unique prints. And a lot of what I do in the realm of drawing still begins with a print of some sort, and then I draw over it, or something to that effect. When I started doing those drawings, I was using these really hard graphite pencils, like a 6H. I liked the way that it scarred and engraved the paper a little bit. Anyway, collage is also a big part of your work right?

DS: It’s split between drawing and collage. The collages being relatively new, only because it's been the last 10 years. I had done a series of collages right outside of graduate school. They were drawing and paintings on paper that were then cut and torn into fragments and then reassembled. They were the beginning of moving away from that gestural abstraction. But the collages that I make now began when I was an assistant to Bruce Conner.

Unfortunately, as his time was winding down, he had developed neuropathy, and so he had little motor control in his hands. He wanted to make collages, but he couldn't cut out the paper or arrange it without a great amount of struggle and strife. So, he had me making his collages under his supervision. I found that I had an affinity for the material. He was using illustrations from 19th century publications like The Illustrated London News. I don't know how familiar you are with Bruce’s collages, but they are very much coming out of the surrealist vein à la Max Ernst, though often with an edge of political satire and social commentary. After he died, his wife Jean gifted me all the source material.

We had two collages in progress when he died. I sat on those for a year, and then I went back into them and finished them. Jean has one and I have the other. It took me a while to find my voice in using this material. I knew how to make a Bruce Conner collage, but I don't want to make Bruce Conner collages. Also, I'm not interested in making something that's surrealistic or that's representational. I'm interested in abstraction. But how does one subvert imagery that's designed to be representational? Imagery that's designed to tell a story or illustrate the news of the day?

The Illustrated London News was the Life magazine of the mid to late 19th century. In them, you have images of traveling to exotic lands, political events, and things like that. How do you take this material and subvert it? It took me some time to be able to get to that place where I felt like I could succeed at that. You cannot completely subvert the imagery and make it devoid of representation, but I think I've got the collages to a place where they're largely abstract.

MS: That’s a great way of working. I really appreciate that. I wasn’t sure what your source material was, but it looked like illustrations or etchings. From the color of the paper alone I could get a sense for the age of the source material.

That was precisely what attracted me to your work. There's a naturalistic sense of light and space in them, but at the same time, they are obviously prioritizing line, shape, and composition. The representational aspect of the source material doesn't seem to be the priority. Instead, it’s the arrangement of things. Transforming the source material so that it moves away from what it was originally representing, that must be extremely difficult.

DS: Like I said, it took me a minute to get to that place to figure out how can I do this.

MS: Collage brings about an inventiveness that I would never arrive at on my own. Like you, I don't ever feel a desire to combine representational imagery the way that many people do when they think about collage. I love finding unexpected either colors, textures, or patterns. It keeps me on my toes a little bit more than drawing. Collage has a way of always introducing something outside of me.

environment #57, 2024, collage of found illustrations, 8 7/16 x 6 1/8 inches

DS: Yeah. You're given a set of predetermined shapes, forms, textures, and light. Then you combine these disparate elements and see how they can then be united in some interesting and holistic way. I call my collages “environments” because I want to create a space that feels whole and complete. Even though it's composed of many different elements that are completely unrelated to each other. Sometimes you put two unrelated images together, and they bond so well that it seems like it was absolutely necessary. That somehow, they have always been that way.

I go to great lengths to make it look seamless. I've had a number of people look at the collages and can't tell where one piece ends and another piece begins. That means I'm being successful at what I'm trying to do. Because while I like the idea of bringing disparate elements together and the idea of what collage is, ultimately the irony is making it look like it's not a collage, that it's just always been this way, that it's not a sum of parts. It's a complete whole.

MS: I think that that struggle goes well beyond just finding a sense of visual unity. I'm extremely particular about my source material. That was actually what led me into photography. I wanted to photograph textures and objects and use the photos imagery. Just as you said, I want to create an environment that is a little bit less attached to reality than just a straight picture would be. I really enjoy learning about photography. I am trying to improve my craft, but I don't think that I'm able to just stop at just a straight photograph. There's some other type of manipulation that I want to do.

DS: Yeah, it sounds like that's where you're at as well, that it's a very carefully considered thing. What I enjoy about your collages is how you subvert the photographic quality of them. I know that they’re photographs, but they feel like drawings. It's fascinating to me how you take a medium and then basically turn it into this other medium.

MS: That’s a high compliment. I really appreciate that. In your studio, it looks like you're continuing to use these 19th-century illustrations. Is that still material that's left over from Conner?

DS: Yeah, I still have quite a bit of it left. I have ended up purchasing through eBay more issues of The Illustrated London News, and also Harper’s. They're not that difficult to come by and amazingly not that expensive. I can't use all of it because some of it is too representational, especially people; maybe elements of a figure. Architecture can also be very, very difficult to undermine and have it become something other than what it is. Some of my future goals are, can I figure out a way to, again, further undermine the rigid representation of certain aspects of this material. It's a challenge.

MS: Yeah, it’s always a struggle. There have been times in my work where I'll catch a wave for a little bit. If it’s going well, I'm getting a couple of pieces done each week. At those moments, I think I've got it figured it out. Of course, the reality is that it always burns out. Then I’m as confused as ever. I’ll wonder how the hell it worked in the first place. How can I put this stuff together again in a way that accomplishes the same things that are my long-standing goals without repeating myself. I think for me, that's part of the richness of my relationship with collage.

It definitely has the capacity to allude you. Even after you've landed on some general parameters and some common approaches to making work. It's a fresh start with every new composition. Before we move on from the collage thing, one thing that I'm curious about; using old source material, where supplies are limited and there's history attached to it, does that ever stress you out?

Sometimes I have materials that I’ll hold on to for a long time, waiting for the right moment to use it. I’ll get a to a point where I have a hard time working with it. I love working with antique sources, and I like the built-in atmosphere of vintage paper, and sometimes that can hold back a little. Do you ever run into the same thing?

DS: Certainly the drawings that I'm making now, which I informally call labyrinths are all on found vintage paper. I’ve had to learn to let the material do what it’s going to do, and sometimes that means it will self-destruct as I work on it. This used to upset me, but I have come to accept that is this is part of the working process. Ultimately, what draws me (no pun intended) to using vintage paper is that it has its own history, so that what I bring to it then becomes this excess energy that interacts with that built-in time that’s already inherent in the paper. And so back to the collages, the fact that the source material is from the 19th century, it ends up... The resulting collages end up being a displacement in time. Because you can tell that it's old, but there's nothing about it that is speaking to its actual age.

MS: Yeah. Which I think is something that I really appreciate about your work. And again, I think it's a very difficult thing to avoid. They don't feel of a certain time. If you look at them and as you're taking them in, you do start to wonder where these things came from. It's not a complete mystery, and yet, they don't feel like they're pointing toward the past in any way. The paper has an aged quality, but they seem timeless. They don't feel like nostalgic in that way.

I think that’s much more difficult than most people realize. I appreciate that kind of challenge. It’s very daunting to work with antique materials and transcend all of the associations that are already built into it. How can I take something from a very different time and put it on a new path? That’s tough to do.

untitled [diamond net_7], 2021, graphite on paper, 11 7/8 x 9 3/4 inches

DS: I’m glad that you find that my work avoids those kinds of pitfalls. I really am not interested in a romanticism, or a wistful looking back to the past. I like the slippage that happens, and that, of course, makes them as you said, in essence, timeless because you're not really sure what time, if any, they're speaking to. Even though the paper is vintage, the forms themselves really don't always speak to that. They can, but most often they don't. It has a lot to do with my approach to making art, which is all about ambiguity. I am not interested in a fundamental or didactic message, though I can appreciate that in other people's work. I want someone to come to my work and find themselves in a place of questioning. What am I looking at? It's more of a generous attitude. It's like, I'm not telling you something, I'm giving you something. So, you have to find your own way to experience this thing.

MS: Yeah, I completely relate to that. The artists that I have admired on the longest timeline, it always has been a relationship of ambiguity, but it’s more complicated than just ambiguity. Those artists always cause me to wonder what I’m looking at. I get much more out of those viewing experiences than I do something that is directly representational. I’m not really interested in art that is a straight commentary on anything. My work is, in part, fueled by that ambiguity that you're talking about.

DS: What I want are mysteries to be savored, not to be solved.

MS: Yeah. I think that's a great way of putting it. I’m curious how your work is structured. Source material is important, but there's this other element in your work, which is the arrangement of all of it and the way the compositions are put together. A lot of it revolves around geometric shapes. I'm interested in how do you manage that part of it?

DS: Certainly, the introduction of geometry in the work is a way of complicating the spatial elements within it and helps to further reify the given components that are assembled. I find that what I get is spatial layers within the work. So, things suddenly can flip from being on top to being behind all at once, depending on how you want to focus on the piece.

MS: A lot of the source material is really atmospheric. There's a space in those illustrations that you're going to be hard-pressed to find in anything that is contemporary or even in a photograph. Are the geometric shapes a counterbalance to that atmosphere and space in the illustrations?

DS: Yeah, it’s about creating a friction between the resolutely geometric and atmospheric elements. It comes down to a felt quality, if that makes sense. I want to basically try as much as possible to elude language itself. Talking about that part of my work is difficult. But that’s alright because I want it to be difficult to talk about it. Because I want it to be this experiential thing that you can't quite fix on. You think you start to understand, but then it shifts. I don’t want my work to have resolution.

MS: Yeah. That makes total sense to me. You mentioned something a few minutes ago that I wanted to just circle back to. You talked about spatial shifts in your work. Figure / ground shift, disorientation, spatial ambiguity, those are all things that I really appreciate in artwork. I find a great deal of pleasure in things spatially confusing. I think it’s interesting to disrupt a person's point of view. There's any number of ways to do that. We talked about light direction earlier and things of that sort. Is that something that’s important to you?

DS: Absolutely.

MS: Yeah. That's something that I don't think I’ll ever get tired of pursuing. Of course, there are predictable ways to disrupt space in an artwork, but to do it in an original way that can be pretty illusive [or do you mean allusive? I guess either is fine actually. lol]. It’s not a goal that you can rush toward.

I know you're managing drawing right alongside this stuff. Do you have a similar set of goals there?

focusing #3, 2008, graphite on paper, 25 1/2 x 20 inches

DS: I like switching back and forth just because it just forces me to have to think in a different way. I mean, there's certainly similar concerns. I want the drawings, as much as the collages, to be ambiguous. I want them, again, to be those mysteries to be savored not to be solved. I go back to drawing because I like the quality of making marks on paper. The drawings also are about a level of sensual touch that I can't get with collage. I mean, putting together a collage can be a wonderfully sensual experience, but not in the same way when making marks on paper, drawing a line so the line has a particular quality to it. The drawings are extremely about a level of precision that... I want them to be incredibly precise without being fussy and riding that edge between a delicacy and resoluteness.

MS: Yeah. Some of that reminds me of a conversation that I had with Lynn Myers. She was just on volume, and I know Lynn from living in Washington, DC. She was nice enough to give me some studio visits when I was in graduate school. I've been a long-time fan of her work; love her work. We were talking about an ongoing body of work that’s been part of her studio practice for years.

In this group of work, she makes drawings on vintage graph paper. We talked about how when paper is aged, and has a history, it can jumpstart the work, but it also can be really, really difficult to find a rhythm with because, there is a pressure to do the history of the thing justice. Is it ever difficult to draw on or get started with found materials in that way?

DS: I think I've largely let myself go of that. Certain vintage papers can only take so much. Some of it can take a lot of abuse but most of it can't. I've learned over time that it's okay to let something die if it's just not happening. I have a drawing right here that got fucked up. I just had to let it go. I'm hanging on to it now just because I'm hanging on to it, but eventually I'll just tear it up. My other body of process-driven drawings, if they got fucked up at a certain point, it used to really upset me, because sometimes the drawings would take months to complete.

I learned that that's just part of the process and letting that be okay. It's like, yeah, I put time and effort into this thing, and it didn't work. But that's just the way it goes. I've learned not to be precious with the paper. It's going to do what it's going to do, and I'm going to try to make it do what I want it to do, and it's either going to hold up and be something great or it won’t. I don't have too many drawings self-destruct, but that does happen on a semi-regular basis, and that's just part of the working process.

MS: I mentioned earlier that I've had a long habit with drawing of using 6H, 4H pencils that I keep compulsively really, really sharp while I'm drawing. This very tight mechanical repetition has always been a part of my drawing, maybe less so now. I think I'm handling stuff with a lighter touch now. But there was a point at which the paper would start to pill and then where I would go right through it. I remember having more studio meltdowns than I can count over that. Like yourself, it frustrates me less now. I do like the way that graphite really embeds itself in the paper. It feels like I can scratch into the paper with it.

In looking through the installation shots of some of your shows, it looks like there are occasionally photographs that show up. And those photographs, a lot of times, look like they are landscape oriented. I'm just curious, is we've talked a lot about naturalistic light, environment, space. Would you say that landscape, not in a literal way, but in some way, is that a part of your concerns instudio, or is that maybe I'm bringing my own thing to the table?

environment #26, 2018, collage of found images, 7 3/8 x 5 1/2 inches

DS: I would have to say not landscape, but certainly an environmental space, something that you feel that you can enter into. But that doesn't necessarily have to be a landscape. It could be a constructed space. In my last solo show, The center is the edge of the threshold I had these two huge prints made that were based on tiny photo collages that were very representational in many respects. I put them in the show because I wanted a way to create an element for people coming into the gallery to feel like they could really physically walk into a work as all the other work in the show was so small.

MS: Yeah, like an element of a launch pad for the other work in a sense.

DS: Yes, in a way. It was just a way to mix up the space, to create a little bit of theater, basically. Because having a show is like, let's put on a show.

MS: Yeah, totally.

DS: Which was very new for me to consider, that in making a presentation you can have fun with it. That there can be an element of play that goes into it. That certain elements don’t necessarily have to be directly related to the work. It is related, but tangentially. It's more like a vibe. I just wanted this feeling that when you walked in it created this atmosphere that would set the stage for all the other work.

MS: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Having talked about it just a minute with you, because I was looking at the exhibition, the installation photos, and of course, those stand out. And it's pretty distinctly different. What interests me about the juxtaposition of those two things is that the drawings and the smaller works managed to somehow have the same feeling, but they're not the same thing. I could see using the printed collage as a touchstone where you're going up to each piece and wondering, how is it that this is eliciting the same feeling? But it's a completely different scenario. It's not like a one-to-one ratio. Is that a way of thinking about it?

DS: Yeah. Actually, that's a great way to put it because there is a relation, but it's not one-to-one. In fact, I tend to work in bodies of work. They're distinct elements amongst each body of work as its own distinct thing that doesn't directly relate to another body of work, yet there is a relationship. Sometimes it is just a felt relationship, which I think is just as valid as… How can I put this? I mean, we don't go through life having one feeling, one emotional state. And so why should my work be this one unified thing all the time? Those different bodies of work are going to relate because they come from me and my sensibility, even though outwardly, they may not immediately look as directly related. There's still going to be a relationship there. It's just indirect and must be felt out.

MS: I’m really glad that you said that. Because that's a pressure that I feel to develop a perfectly consistent portfolio. But that’s not how I operate. The body of work that I've made in the past 25 years has gone through more transformations than I can count. At times, I have felt that I haven't exercised the right discipline. I think it's important to remember, that it’s not about portfolio consistency, but about being thorough in your studio pursuits. And that if you’re thorough in the way you work, there will be connections between different bodies of work. There's a continuity for those that want to find it.

DS: It’s like, are we creating something that has meaning for ourselves or are we creating product? To put it crudely. I mean, yeah, there are those artists whose work I like tremendously and have a very consistent through line over the course of decades. Great. But we're not all built the same. There are other artists that change over time, and yet there is a shared sensibility from those different aspects of their work over their lifetime. I was recently in Switzerland, and I saw the Carol Rama retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern. There's an artist whose reputation was basically built on her early work, sexualized figurative drawings, which she then revisited toward the end of her life. But over the course of her career, her work changed quite dramatically, following trends in the art world at the time, from minimalist work, to Arte Povera, to the Transavanguardia movement of the '80s when she dipped back into figuration. Yet her work over that whole arc of her career has a felt quality to it that is unmistakably hers.

MS: I do need to exercise a little bit of discipline because a part of what will kickstart my studio day will be thinking of a certain material that I want to use. There are days that I wake up that I feel like printmaking. There are days that I wake up and I feel like drawing. While that's fine up to a certain point, it can sometimes cause me to jump off of a theme prematurely. Sometimes I do have to remind myself that I don't want to be just skipping off the surface of all these different ideas and impulses. Sometimes I just need to settle down and just focus on what I'm doing. But the whole thing with branding oneself, I just think is... I don't know. So, you work on paper for the most part, right?

environment #1, 2014, collage of found illustrations, 7 x 5 inches, [private collection]

DS: Absolutely. I'm working with paper. Either I'm drawing on it, or I'm cutting it up and rearranging it.

MS: I always feel a kinship with people who are works on paper folks. I also have this real affection for small works. I've known that about myself for a long time. Has that been a relatively consistent part of your work? Do you tend to stay at this smaller scale?

DS: I’ve certainly done very large scale works in the past with the other past bodies of drawings. The thought form drawings were oftentimes quite large, like 60 by 76 inches. A lot of the drawings that are made with the little staccato marks densely radiating outwards, those got quite large. But certainly, with the collages and now the labyrinth drawings, I'm bound by the nature of the material itself. I'm not going to find a piece of vintage paper that's 40 by 60. It's just not going to be happening.

I do like the intimacy of a smaller scale. Essentially, the miniature can create a whole world in a way that a large work can't. Because when your mind imaginatively enters that diminutive space, it can be more expansive than a feeling of physically entering that space. I feel that when entering through my mind it can often be more profound and rapturous than something that is physically enormous and overwhelming. Also working on a large scale has, unfortunately, become equated as being more important. But I oftentimes think it just ends up being spectacle. With a small object, I like that you have to approach it gently. It's a much more, I don't know, kind thing. Is that a weird thing to say

MS: No, I totally get it. I like the idea of having one viewer at a time on something. Sometimes when driving, there’s these designated vista points. It's this established point where you sit with strangers and observe the best view of something. I don't ever feel compelled to stop at those things. I’d rather stop when something has reached me personally. When my own visual instincts told me to take a moment to observe a place. When there are instructions to stop and look it kind of waters it down.

I always like that experience in museums where there will be a really small piece in a gallery and you go over and you can have your moment with it while everybody else is soaking up this big, monumental piece.

DS: Yeah. I mean, there's such a drive towards the spectacle in the contemporary artworld which is driven by the market. It's also driven by the culture we're in that forces unwanted demands on our attention. Many artists I often feel are compelled to create something big to try and desperately grasp hold of an audience. Going small is, I think, a more radical but ultimately generous move.

VOLUME: Thank you to Dean Smith for taking the time to speak about his work. To see more of Dean’s work visit his website here or instagram account @d_hematins