I had the pleasure of catching up with Northumberland-based artist Gillian Lee Smith. We had a wonderfully meandering conversation, covering Smith’s latest fascination with shipwrecks, how lockdown influenced her work and destruction as part of the process of creation.
“For the all the hours that I paint, probably 10 times that has gone into writing and imagining.” For Gillian Lee Smith giving language to an idea is the first step of creation. Through writing she pulls together the many strands of thought that are eventually realised in an artwork. What are the strands? ‘It’s memories, it’s stories, it’s other artists, it’s books, it’s poems, it’s everything’. This expansive, multi-disciplinary way of working is not new to her. During her years as a costume design student in Edinburgh she would put together pieces that drew on the fashions of different time periods. With her latest body of work, it was over many months that Smith’s research, writing and sketching evolved into experimentations with paint. What emerged was a mesmerising series of paintings, named ‘The Lost and the Left Behind’, focused on the Eyemouth Disaster and the wrecked ships still visible in West Dumbartonshire’s Bowling Harbour.
If you aren't familiar with these events and places, the Eyemouth Disaster of 1881 refers to a devastating storm which struck fishing fleets leaving the Border town of Eyemouth, tragically killing one hundred and eighty-nine fishermen. A hundred years before, Bowling Harbour saw the opening of the Forth and Clyde canal in 1790, consolidating the village as a centre for shipbuilding in the Glasgow area. As her costumes once brought together Anglo-Saxon and Victorian influences, Smith’s paintings probe at the fault line between time periods, imagining their crashing together. In her latest paintings for ScotlandArt Gallery, she transports contemporary viewers into the past, inviting us to view the vessels destroyed at Eyemouth and Bowling as powerful metaphors for what we treasure and protect on one hand and leave behind on the other.
'O'er the Dark Sea I Flew,' and 'Reclaimed by the Sea', both oil and cold wax.
This symbolism is translated into the artwork’s spectral texture, layered over with ship names and related dates floating like apparitions on the surface. Smith is needlessly apologetic that her work is ‘always a bit melancholic’. It’s true that her paintings invite deep and complex feelings as we sense the weight of the human lives intertwined with the fate of these ships. I think we also pick up on the emotional honesty with which Smith approaches her subjects: ‘all we can do is create from a place within’.
'The Bones of the Sea,' oil and cold wax.
Interestingly, Smith’s process mirrors the cycle of wreckage and remembrance. First applying oil paint and cold wax, she then splashes on mineral spirits which dissolve both. In an act that would be terrifying for an artist less open to serendipity, this dissolving is entirely random. ‘I don’t know where it’s going to hit, and I don’t know how deep it’s going to go or how many layers it’s going to take away’. It’s ‘a process of archaeology.’ Like the act of remembering itself, paint is lost, reclaimed and re-worked, blended with new emotions and experiences. This layering and removal of materials gives her paintings a fraught texture, as if to dramatize the vessels’ fight to be remembered.
Before moving to Northumberland twelve years ago Smith’s work was almost entirely figurative, but the harbours and woodlands of the Scottish Borders captured her imagination. She first started painting trees around the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Sketching them became therapeutic, but it was never the leafy canopy that interested her. It was always their trunks and root networks; tangled limbs taking on the fluidity of water in Smith’s paintings.
From chatting to Smith I realise that it's no surprise it was the roots of trees which became her inspiration. Networks and connections are an important thread that runs through both Smith’s practice and her paintings. She tells me that teaching and mentoring other artists helps her refine her own work, as does the feedback she receives from people who view her pieces at galleries and exhibitions. She describes her process as ‘circular’, as in turn her art encourages viewers to reflect on the subject matter and consider what it evokes for them. For Smith, that’s what it’s all about – ‘art is a conversation’.
'The Here and Now', oil.
What’s next? Smith tells me she’s not yet done with the rich imagery of shipwrecks. ‘I feel like I’ve got a lot more to unpack’. We can’t wait to see how this subject develops in Smith’s work. For now, we’re thrilled to be showing her new pieces. All are available to purchase with free UK and worldwide delivery.
'Understory', oil.
