Elaine Smollin: Elaine Smollin Drawings Essay by Stephen Maine

from the exhibition at Kentler International Drawing Space 2007

A short drive north of New York City lies the small town of Palisades, named for the nearby line of lofty cliffs that overlook the Hudson River on its western bank and merge with the Hudson Highlands to the north. Part of the same dramatic topography that provides New York with its uncommonly deep harbor, these unbuildable cliffs guarantee scenic overlooks to motorists for miles along the eponymous parkway through northern New Jersey and New York's Rockland County. The word also refers to a barrier or fortification made of closely spaced stakes or pales.

Scenes from the Life of Charon 2009 Entire Drawing 8 x 24 feet

This conflation of geological and technological vocabularies, of nature and culture, resonates in the drawings of Elaine Smollin. Working in this unprepossessing upstate hamlet for the last three years, Smollin has developed an extraordinary fusion of her interests in archetypal narrative, material culture, geology, philosophy, and art history, while capturing the drama and expansiveness of this landscape in her remarkable project, "Drawings from Palisades".

As a graduate student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the late 1970s, Smollin absorbed the thinking of John Dewey and Suzanne K. Langer; and those philosophers have remained central to her attitude toward the nature of aesthetics, and toward her own art. Dewey, in "Art as Experience", describes activity of the beholder as that of reconstructing the art object in his or her own consciousness, a prerequisite of perception; Langer recognized, in "symbolic transformation" - the penchant humans have for impractical means, such as music, poetry, and art, to come to grips with their experience- evidence of a deep-seated and rational need for those forms.

The political ramifications of the individualism both viewpoints imply, and their suggestion of a kind of psychic borderlessness, have influenced Smollin ever since, informing her study of film theory at NYU FIlm School, and, more recently of archaeology.

Concurrently with her formal art training, Smollin worked at the Robert Elkon Gallery in uptown Manhattan and had frequent, close contact with work by Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Arshile Gorky.

The extraordinary sensitivity of these artists to the expressive potential of their chosen medium made a lasting impression, as did the varying degrees to which their imagery suggest the mythic dimension of figuration. But her art historical references include giants of the Western narrative-figurative tradition, especially Tiepolo, Durer, and Michelangelo, from which Smollin often quotes directly.

Her enthusiasms also embrace Japanese painting, a tradition in which the autographic mark, that badge of individual sensibility, asserts itself even while tethered to the depiction of boulders and foliage, flora and fauna.

Winter in Ghent, Charcoal/brush 1995 22 x 30
In 1991, Smollin was employed at the excavation of New York's African Slave Burial Ground in lower Manhattan. There she absorbed the methods and theory of that profession, as well as its parlance, for example the "matrix", which refers to the three-dimensional axis on which excavations are recorded.

Photograph by Elaine Smollin

1884 Archaeologist's Field Note Book

Plan Drawing of Lithuanian Pagan Burial Mound by Tadas Daugirdas

Rare Manuscripts Collection Vilnius University

The artist was immediately attracted to the field as an outlet for her considerable drawing skills and grew to love it for the opportunity it presented to reconcile naturalism and metaphysics, the way in which the material artifacts the archaeologist renders suggest, even in their fragmentary, residual state, the relations between mortals and gods, flesh and the spirit. From this experience she has recast the Charon figure for her drawings, not as a monstrous harbinger of dread but as a man disillusioned and yet compassionate.

Hugely important to the course of Smollin's visual thinking was an autumn spent drawing in Prague's ancient, basin-like Loretta Orchard, an experience that allowed her to sense the "volume" of the landscape, and prompted a desire to elaborate on that vision.

Loretta Orchard Prague, 2010, Cherry Charcoal

30 x 22 inches Private Collection Berlin

So it was that two years ago, in May 2005, Smollin broke out of the traditional rectangular format and began to approach her drawings' supports- large sheets of heavy, rough watercolor paper- as modular units that could be repositioned and recombined at will, in response to compositional contingencies as they might present themselves.

A salient characteristic of Drawings from Palisades is this symphonically expanded format, which, in its graphical fluidity and procedural flexibility, suggests the body's movement from point to point through the landscape, and mimics the mind's movement through allegorical space as it leaps from thought to thought.

Any of these component drawings could stand alone as a self-sufficient artwork: in aggregate they form a panorama as if viewed from shifting vantage points. But Smollin is not cubist. By disassembling the picture plane, she does not fragment space, but, emphasizing the interchangability of form and void, plenum and vacuum, near and distant, unifies it.

The artist has investigated the optical characteristics of charcoal for thirty years. She now makes her own, an operation that results in a dish of little black shards in which, working in the field, the artist identifies her dusky palette- the range of black and the differing tactility of carbonized cherry, elm, willow, and birch- not by sight but by touch.
Drawing No. 3 In progress in the outdoor studio, 2007 8 x 24 feet

As a result of Smollin's process, the paper she works on is as visually prominent a component of the final work as the charcoal she applies to it, with a touch that veers from raspy to velvet and yields tonalities both delicate and forceful.

From this matrix of strokes emerges the suggestion, sometimes faint and sometimes not, of human figures, animals, vessels, as well as the rocks and trees that have been the iconographic bedrock of landscape representation for centuries.

Smollin's drawings bear their intellectual burden lightly, buoyed rather than encumbered by the artist's breadth of study, travel, and experience. This is because, having mastered her deceptively simple materials, she graciously and confidently allows them their distinctive voice.

Ironbridge 1995, Phoenixville PA, 1995

Drawings on View in 2014-2018
Arts Worcester at Hanover Theater, Worcester MA
October 30, 2018-March 18, 2019
Drawing the Environment, Alpine NJ May 2018

Worcester Art Museum, Faculty Show, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018
The Foster Gallery, July 2015, Worcester MA

Steichen Pond Drawings, Kentler International Drawing Space 2018
Brooklyn NY 535 Van Brunt Street, Red Hook, 11205
Director, Florence Neal Info@kentlergallery.org
Corner House Drawings 2014, through January 2015
Davis Gallery, Worcester MA, 2014, 2015, 2016