Allison Leigh Smith | Unapologetically Free

Allison Leigh Smith charts her own course in wildlife art

By Gussie Fauntleroy

This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

THE VISIT LASTED only a couple of hours. But during the brief time that Allison Leigh Smith stood transfixed in front of traditional Japanese samurai clothing and armor at the Phoenix Art Museum a few years ago, everything she thought was possible about her art changed irreversibly. Before that day, the beautifully detailed animals that inhabited her paintings were set against vague, ambiguous backgrounds—not in their natural habitats but not yet free from a limited, logical conception of where they might be instead.

Now, before her in the museum, was example after example of astonishing combinations of patterns, colors, symbols, and materials that made no outwardly logical sense at all. But it worked. There were bronze helmets in the shape of an eggplant or elk antlers, elegantly embroidered images of cherry blossoms and tigers, and other wildly incongruent elements intricately sewn, sculpted, etched, and braided into layers of protective garments. Each was unique, representing that warrior’s cosmology of power and protection.

“It was stunning. They were vastly different and insanely decorative,” Smith says. “There was seemingly no connection, but I didn’t question it. It all worked together because it was so beautiful.” By the time she left the museum, a door had been flung open in her mind: “I realized I could do anything with my paintings. I could combine anything.” And as it turned out, the skills and aesthetic qualities she had available to draw on were as diverse, in their own way, as those employed by the ancient samurai.

Today Smith’s award-winning paintings still feature portraits of wild animals, including many she has personally known over years of volunteering at wildlife rehabilitation centers. But now, against backgrounds frequently inspired by her previous work in textile design, she also includes hand lettering and other imagery. The 43-year-old artist often collaborates with wildlife rehab volunteer friends who photograph animals and with artists practicing calligraffiti, a new term for combining calligraphy and graffiti, or “gothic hand-styling with a splash,” as she puts it. Her labor-intensive process involves up to 200 layers, and one painting can take as long as six weeks to complete.

THE GENESIS of much that makes up Smith’s art these days can be traced to her childhood. The youngest of four children of a doctor and a teacher in a Cincinnati suburb, she was known as the artist of the family. She always had a special affinity with animals and leaned toward the creative, right-brained side of things. When she was 10, a school project required her to talk with a local professional in a field to which she aspired. Introverted by nature, she gathered her courage and called modernist artist Charley Harper (1922-2007), whose stylized wildlife paintings later brought him national acclaim. Harper graciously invited her to his home studio—which she remembers being surrounded by bird feeders—and spoke with her about his art. “It stuck with me that being an artist was possible and that you could surround yourself with things that you love,” she says.

Smith’s mother helped her research schools for pursuing her dream of animation art. Soon after starting classes at Columbus College of Art & Design on a scholarship, however, she realized that animation did not match her constitution. “I’m slow and methodical, and animation needs a quick brain and a fast hand,” she says. She switched tracks and received a strong classical foundation in fine art. Along the way, Lowell Tolstedt, a drawing instructor who served as the college’s dean of fine arts, offered a pivotal piece of advice. While others were encouraging a looser, more expressionistic painting style, Tolstedt recognized in Smith a fellow realist. “He encouraged me to tighten up, study more, practice, slow down,” she says. “It was like someone finally gave me permission to be myself.”

Almost immediately after graduation, Smith was hired as an art educator at the Columbus Museum of Art. Three years later her adventurous spirit was ready for change. She moved to Hawaii because, as she puts it, “Sunshine and beaches sounded like the opposite of Ohio suburbs.” For almost seven years she worked as a gallery director in Maui, learning the business of art, connecting with artists, and painting on her own. At the time her subjects were “flowers, my cat, rocks in the river—anything and everything around me that I loved and that was beautiful to me.”

In 2006 Smith made the decision to return to the mainland. She could feel herself slipping into the island groove, a seriously mellow attitude in which ambition, including an art career, takes a back seat. With family in the Phoenix area, she moved there and was hired to design textiles, first for a quilting business and then in the fashion world. Along the way she spent many years indulging her love of animals by volunteering at wildlife sanctuaries, including Wild at Heart and the Southwest Wildlife Conservation Center.

While feeding, cleaning, and caring for wild creatures, she came to know and love individual birds and other animals. She photographed many of them and began giving them the spotlight in her paintings, shifting away from her previous subjects, which included weathered marquee signs rendered visually compelling through the patina of urban decay. Then came the day she encountered the samurai suits of armor. She returned to her wildlife paintings with a new eye, free to combine seemingly disparate elements according to an interior logic of pure aesthetics and personal symbolism.

HER PAINTING UNAPOLOGETIC, for instance, features a coiled rattlesnake and large blossoms against an indistinct background suggestive of a rainy summer garden. Across one side is a fragment of the painting’s title in large calligraphic script, inspired by Smith’s grandfather’s avocation as a calligrapher. The flowers, a gift from the artist’s partner, recall a certain conversation they had. The background is based on the backyard at the couple’s present home in Durango, CO. While the subject is a venomous snake, Smith didn’t want the image to feel vicious or hard. “You can be both fierce and gentle, and unapologetic about being either,” she says. “It’s about being who you are and standing up for what is important to you. It’s about inner strength.”

Although Smith eventually moved away from Arizona and no longer volunteers with wildlife centers there, she continues to be in contact not only with those organizations but with others around North America. When she visits any of them, she photographs animals. Friends who volunteer also send her photos. In exchange, the artist shares her profits from the paintings’ sales with these groups whose mission—and the creatures in their care—are so close to her heart. TUCKED IN, for example, portrays a northern spotted owl that is part of a breeding program in British Columbia. She set the owl against a damask pattern of her own design featuring silhouettes of the wildlife that surrounds her home. “This piece is about this species and my love of nature, our connectedness, coexistence, and codependence,” she says.

Smith’s artistic process generally begins with photographs, sketches, and drawings of an animal, other imagery and lettering, and frequently a textile pattern. She layers, composes, and fine-tunes the elements using various software before painting the final piece in oil on aluminum. The metal’s smooth surface allows her to meticulously render such details as a creature’s fur, whiskers, eyes, feathers, or scales. These days, many of Smith’s paintings are done in a circular format. The shape “speaks to the circle of life, connectedness, and the symbology I love,” she says. “I’m super digging it.”

Her work, already in the collections of such institutions as the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum and the Arizona Humane Society, recently was acquired by the National Museum of Wildlife Art for its permanent collection. The piece, titled THE COMMON THREAD, is especially meaningful to the painter because, along with a hummingbird, it features a barn owl named Amigo whom she got to know at Wild at Heart. “He’s so beautiful and so sweet in nature,” she says of the owl.

For the past couple of years Smith has been involved in a major public art project in Durango in collaboration with her partner, sculptor Bryce Pettit. The artwork, commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, incorporates images based on ideas contributed by hundreds of Durango residents symbolizing what the community means to them. Consisting of 20 steel panels each measuring 4 by 8 feet and featuring laser-cut patterns, it will be installed in the median of the main highway into town, with the imagery visible from both sides.

Because she works on her art “all the time at all hours,” Smith’s studio is in the living room of her home, which overlooks a small valley. There she’s in the company of her dog, two cats, and “delightful” pet tarantula. Outside are multiple bird feeders, just as she remembers at the studio of her early mentor. Her time-consuming approach sometimes means forgoing other activities, but she believes that what she gives up is worth it. “I would sacrifice almost anything to leave a legacy of great art that says something powerful in a unique way,” she says. “It’s everything to me.”

representation
Horton Fine Art, Beaver Creek, CO; Astoria Fine Art, Jackson, WY; www.allisonleighsmith.com.

This story was featured in the June 2020 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art June 2020 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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