Feb26
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Beau Smith Frog
master sculptor tells all
Nov05
In the early eighties, my father, Charles Smith, a brilliant and massively talented man, came up with the original design for the human-sized copper frog that I build today. This is what happened. My dad was working in the science field with statistics. He was working at the medical university in Charleston, SC. But this is not the work he ended up doing. He was an aspiring sculptor and he wanted to do that full-time. He was very ambitious about this and he worked in many mediums. He was not trained as an artist, although his mother was an accomplished watercolorist who also taught art and was known for her brilliant watercolors of Charleston scenes and particularly for her miniatures.
My grandmother…”Gammy”, we called her. I gave her that name when I was a toddler. I think that’s how the story goes. She could also tickle the ivories. I remember how much I loved hearing her play ragtime on the grand piano in their old Charleston home. She was one of those who inspired me to become an artist when I was a kid. She’d feed me spare pieces of matt board and watercolor paper and little sketchbooks to draw on. She’d sometimes bring me with her to draw a cityscape. Charleston is known for all its old colonial buildings, per square inch and mile Charleston has the most old buildings in the US.
My dad’s dad, my paternal grandfather, had a natural gas business. This man was very mechanically minded. He had all sorts of tools. His car and his bedroom were the equivalent of a packed tool shed. I believe my father’s development as a sculptor had as much to do with his father as it did his mother. When my dad was a kid he was working with copper, putting things together, perhaps brazing. Once he told me what others would say about him is that he lived behind “The Copper Curtain”. This during the cold war and Russia’s “Iron Curtain”. A side note: I wonder if my dad had any enemies when he was a kid. Or was considered one. Anyway I’m sure it was his dad supplying him the copper fittings and scrap just as my grandmother later supplied me with materials to draw and color on.
My paternal grandfather also had a strong connection to nature. He loved to fish, crab, and shrimp on his country place out on Johns Island, which is near Charleston SC and the beaches, Kiawah and Seabrook. My father now lives on that little island surrounded by marshland on Johns Island. I think he still makes frogs. Not as many as I do, I don’t think. We don’t talk a lot. My brother also makes frogs. Me, my brother, and my dad are the Frogsmiths. And if you see a frog that looks anything like what I do and it’s not mine, it’s one of my brother’s or father’s. We have copycats. But the copycats can’t do what we do. And I don’t think they ever will.
I talk about my grandfather’s connection to nature because I think that had something to do with my father finding frogs as the subject for his sculpture. These large frog sculptures reconnect one to nature. In a garden they are the highlight and keystone. They bring everything together. They do that for a number of reasons. Among those reasons is that they provide a doorway to nature. A connecting point. One way to describe it is to say the frog, especially the large human-sized frog, is part frog and part human. It’s an anthropomorphized frog. In art this type of work is often classified as whimsical. Frog and human are fused together. The human element and the nature element become one. So when you see one of my large frogs and smile and perhaps sit beside it and have your picture taken, you receive the benefit of human warmth and the rejuvenating capacity of nature. You are, in effect, being welcomed and encouraged to be a part of nature. Now all you may feel is the joy and fun of sitting beside the big frog. But that’s a powerful experience. Walt Disney pioneered the entertainment industry for general audiences based on the ability to create just this sort of experience.
When I was a teenager, my father was creating sculpture to sell and he was working at the medical university. Gradually he transitioned to sculpture. But he didn’t get his real break until he started making frogs. Before that he was struggling. But I don’t exactly want to put it that way because he was finding that his sculpture did sell and that it did help him pay the bills. Many artists find themselves in the position of having art that sells but not enough and not for enough money that it sustains them. Unless perhaps they live modestly. But when you have three kids, as my father did, that’s difficult. So he had his day job and plugged away at the sculpture as well.
We lived in an old colonial house near the battery in Charleston, SC. My dad had renovated that house. I was born into that situation. When I was born the house was still being renovated. To this day I find myself comfortable, perhaps too comfortable, around building and renovation. One day I would like to live in a finished house with a finished sculpture studio… But perhaps on the score of the sculpture studio, expansion is a permanent issue. At least for now…
When I was around fourteen or fifteen, our backyard was filled with all sorts of my dad’s sculptures. He did a lot of abstracts but also simplified or abstracted figurative work. He studied all the greats in sculpture: Giacometti, Calder, Henry Moore, Rodin… And he tried to emulate something of the best of them in his work. He wanted to be great. He had great drive, energy, ambition, and discipline to match his inspiration. He worked in wood, clay, and, above all, metal, or, as he liked to put it, direct metal, which is the term for creating sculpture through welding and other direct manipulation, cutting, pounding, shaping and so on, rather than by casting.
As a result of my dad’s efforts, our backyard looked rather like some alien universe, with an abstract creature here and there, a dancer made of shapes, a juggler, a clown, all quasi-abstract, or what I might call abstract figurative… And there were the mobiles and purely abstract works, some rather large. All this in the backyard of what was otherwise a charming and picturesque Charleston town home garden area enclosed by old red brick with other Charleston homes and gardens on the other sides of the enclosing walls. It was a strange sight, our backyard, at that time. An anachronistic arrangement of futuristic creations in an old time setting. It was the sort of stuff I loved. It was some of the better part of what was often a difficult childhood which I will not delve into completely here. Let us say that living with an artist is not exactly always easy. Though for myself I have grown up a lot and strive to bring order and sanity into the chaotic days that most artists will be confronted with at least from time to time.
Around age fourteen or fifteen I exhibited drawings with my dad’s sculpture and my grandmother’s watercolors at a little gallery called Nancy’s. The gallery was right across from the Dock Street Theatre, and it got a good bit of foot traffic and people knew the gallery well enough for my grandmother and my father to sell their work there. I didn’t sell my drawings. I didn’t want to. I had wanted to keep them and was happy just to show them. I’ve kept the clipping from the Charleston New and Courier. The title of the article is “3 Generations of Artists”. At the top of the article is a big picture of the three of us looking at one of my dad’s sculptures, an abstract figure doing a balancing act on a tightrope. My father seems to be pointing to it and saying something rather witty we are supposed to assume about the sculpture. He has a pipe in the hand that gestures toward the sculpture. He is wearing one of those professor type jackets. You know, the kind with the patches on the sleeves. He’s in a turtleneck and has a goatee. He was really playing up the artist bohemian. A real character, that guy. I’m in the foreground. I have longish hair. I’m in jeans and what looks to be a corduroy leisure jacket. I have major stars in my eyes. Doe-eyed dreamer in drab teenage garb is what I’d call myself. My grandmother, Gammy, as we called her (A nickname I gave her when I was a kid; that’s how I pronounced “grandmother” as a toddler.) is in the background. She is somewhat slender and in a colorful dress though you can’t tell that from the picture because it’s black and white. She’s wearing a beaded necklace and a scarf. Her style of dress, like her watercolors, tended to be clean, crisp, and colorful.
At the time I decided I’d become a famous artist. I’d started wondering how long I would have to put up with being thought of as a kid and not a professional. I was the “artist kid”. That didn’t spell bucks. But when I showed with my father and grandmother in that exhibition, I started thinking the artist kid could actually someday become rich and famous. Someday…