Lory Smith
Fantastic colors with a memory of grinding pigments, making
shades, pulling visions from behind an imagination. Lory Smith makes the art of
a generation floating through time. He becomes a part of the Endless when fixing
his seen to canvas, paper and shopping bags and all in his reach.
click the small pics to enlarge email
Lory Lory Online
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Coincidences Led Lory Smith From Art To Film And Back To Art Again
Lory Smith’s art has been likened to both Picasso and Keith Haring, and described as “My Favorite Martian” meets “Geronimo.” That’s probably appropriate for an artist who often creates his bold, brightly colored pastels on brown paper grocery bags.
And since having fun with both the medium and the imagery and symbolism is integral to his own enjoyment of the work, Lory doesn’t mind those descriptions.
“It’s all out of my imagination,” he said of his pastel and oil paintings, which will be shown at the Gallery on West Main in Chatham through the end of the month. “I’ve developed over the years an iconography of images I tend to utilize. They’re symbolic, related to things I’ve done. They’re also dream like.”
Although the elements of his paintings often have specific meaning to him, Smith likes to let those images speak to the individual viewer. “I’m a big believer in encouraging people to express themselves, being a self-taught person at most everything I’ve done.”
Smith, who has summered in Chatham for the past five years with his fiancé, artist Andrea Torrens, has done a lot, by most measures. He’s been an artist, filmmaker, author, and worked in the movie business for 20 years.
“I was one of the knuckleheads who helped start the Sundance Film Festival,” he said during an interview last week on the front porch of the new gallery, located in the former Coach and Four space in the Colonial Building just off the downtown rotary. Wearing khaki shorts, a grey shirt under a pink striped oxford, his salt and pepper hair was pulled back in a pony tail and his blue eyes brightened as he spoke of his current work as well as his days in the film industry.
Originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, Lory was living on a farm in 1976 when he and a friend, Bri Matheson, began making junk sculptures out of the resting farm machinery they found lying around. As a self-trained artist --- he studied political science in college and initially was on track for a law career --- he considered himself a folk artist, but was dissuaded from that perception when the state’s arts coordinator visited his studio. “He told me I was too young to be a folk artist, that I was just an artist,” he recalled. Lory needed a job, and the official told him that the state was forming a film office to facilitate the use of Utah locations in movies. He applied for the job of commissioner, and got it.
“It was pure luck,” said Smith. “I never had any design on what I ended up doing. In a weird way, the film stuff kind of came out of my art work.”
He helped lure some of the world’s top filmmakers to the state. Among the 85 or so films he facilitated filming in Utah were “Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade” and “Thelma and Louise.” Smith helped organize what began as the U.S. Film Festival and gradually morphed into the Sundance Film Festival, which is now the world’s premier showcase for independent films. At the time, the term “independent film” was virtually unknown; non-Hollywood movies were usually referred to as regional films, and were seldom seen outside of their area of origin, aside from a few film festival.
Those years “almost feel like a different life,” Smith said.
“It was a great 20-year run for me, and I felt good about it,” he said. He left the festival because he was “fed up with the politics” and commercialism that had crept into the event. He detailed his experiences in the 1999 book “Party in a Box: the Story of the Sundance Film Festival.”
Art had been part of Smith’s life since his childhood, when his parents recognized an interest and sent him to art lessons. Everyone else in the class was an adult and the teacher’s stinging criticism of the 12-year-old boy’s work prompted him to duck out of the remaining classes. In 1986 he picked up some pastels his mother had given to him when he was a youngster and began drawing, and since he left the film business he’s concentrated on turning out a huge amount of work.
Smith’s pastels and oils rely on humor, mystery, innocence and a strong sense of place to draw in the viewer and elicit an emotional response. Among his iconography are spirit figures, movie cameras and a log cabin that appears in many of his paintings and harkens back to the first image he drew as a child. Each piece is grounded in the moment it is created, he said.
“Each individual piece is a story for me, what was going on with me, what I was thinking,” he said. He often surprises himself with the level of symbolism that crops up in the pictures, which come from somewhere deep inside, often spontaneously. “I’m a totally intuitive painter,” he said. Moving to New York City five years ago also changed the content of his work. Where previously, it often had a Southwestern quality, it’s taken on a more urban feel, but is also influenced by the time he’s spent here.
“My sense of place has always been a big part of my work,” he said.
He’s prolific, too, painting daily until the well is dry, and then doing something else --- working on a novel, sailing, writing a film script --- until he’s ready to paint again. “For me, they both come out of some sort of exploration,” he said of both writing and painting.
Smith also tends to use whatever materials are at hand, though he does like the texture of paper grocery bags, especially for pastels and crayons. “It’s really durable, strong paper. You can really work it,” he said, noting that the boldness of his lines and heavy colors often require that he get a bit physical with his materials.
Smith has managed to carve out a niche for himself and place his paintings in some 150 private and corporate collections. The current Chatham show is titled “Paths Cross,” a reference to the connections that brought him here (he knows gallery owner Diane Eckstein from her interior decorating work in New York, and his old friend Bri Matheson also has work in the gallery). Ultimately, Smith hopes to challenge the viewer to express themselves, even if they feel they have no artistic talent.
“I don’t draw particularly well,” he said. “That’s where people get bogged down, thinking they have to be able to draw well to do art.” Someday, he added, he would like to be able to say that all of the time and energy he has put into his art has helped him draw better.
“That’s where I should end up.”