Here’s a great article by a friend about another friend. The author, Kirk Kramer is a great man, full of life and love. Andrew Smith is a good artist friend from high school (St. Greg’s).
See Andrew’s work and bio (very impressive) at his website
https://www.andrewwilsonsmith.com/
August 7, 2010
Andrew Smith’s latest project brings sculpting talents to area monastery
By Kirk KramerPhoenix Staff Writer
— LOST CITY — Johnny Cash breaks the quiet of a remote, peaceful valley in the Ozarks, a few miles from this aptly named village in Cherokee County.
“A Boy Named Sue” accompanies the yaps of a puppy named Argus — and the peal of bells calling white-robed monks to prayer on a nearby hilltop.
Andrew Smith finds himself at work with his hammer and chisel in a makeshift studio — a long way from Scotland and the Florence Academy of Fine Art.
Smith earlier served as an apprentice to Alexander Stoddart, court sculptor to the Queen of England. He studied at world-class art schools in Philadelphia and Italy. One commission took him to Lugano, Switzerland.
His latest project has brought him here.
Smith has been commissioned by the Benedictines of Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey to make two carvings. They will adorn the new church that is rising at their property on Roach Mountain, east of Fort Gibson Lake.
Clear Creek Abbey was founded in 1999 by monks from Fontgombault, a thousand-year old monastery in France. The abbot of Fontgombault told the architect — Smith’s father, Notre Dame University professor Thomas Gordon Smith — to design a monastery “that will last a thousand years.”
So Andrew Smith hopes the carvings he is creating now, using limestone from Batesville, Ark., will contribute to the worship and “beauty of holiness” at Clear Creek for a long time.
“We are delighted to have Andrew Smith with us at Clear Creek Abbey this summer,” said Philip Anderson, abbot of the monastery. “He is a very gifted young sculptor, who after finishing his studies in Florence has been commissioned to carve two monumental capitals for the front door of our church under construction.”
Capitals are the decorative elements at the top of a column.
A graduate student from Australia staying at the monastery also visited Smith’s studio this week.
“I think his carvings rock,” Lyle Cooney-Pead said.
Like the architecture of the church, the capitals are in the Romanesque style. The Romanesque was used in the early Middle Ages, when monasteries were among the main institutions in Western culture.
Smith described the scenes he is carving.
“They show the narrative of salvation history, beginning with the creation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, then their sin and expulsion from the garden,” Smith said. “This leads to the prophecy of Isaiah chapter seven, ‘Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.’ Then (the capitals) depict as the central scene the Annunciation. That is the moment when the angel, Gabriel, appears to the Virgin Mary and asks her to be the mother of the Messiah.”
The monastery at Clear Creek is dedicated to the Virgin Mary under the title of the Annunciation.
Each capital will be 15 inches tall, 2 feet wide, and 2 feet deep. They will rest on columns 12 feet tall. Smith is working from plaster models he uses as a guide in carving the sculptures in stone.
Smith said he was moved by the comments of a young monk after he looked at the plaster models.
“The brother drew several theological ideas out of the sculptures I had never thought of,” Smith said. “He was able to interact with the sculpture I made. I’m honored that (these works of art) can be used as objects of contemplation by the monks in drawing closer to God.”
Smith’s conversation is laced with classical and literary references, and a well-thought-out philosophy of art. His profession and his culture are the fruit of an upbringing in an artistic and intellectual family, and of what he calls the “poetic education” he received as a high school student at St. Gregory’s Academy, a boarding school near Scranton, Pa.
Smith’s largest commission to date was a project for the college bookstore at California State University at Stanislaus. It depicts six California authors, including John Steinbeck and William Saroyan, in symposium with the classical authors Homer and Sappho.
“I’m more interested in human beings than I am in shape,” Smith said. “I really enjoy, when I make a portrait of a historical figure, getting to know and understand that person, to have that knowledge be an inspiration for my art.”
He has even put his knowledge of Johnny Cash and his music to use in carving a bust of the singer.
Smith looks at sculpture and art in a distinctly traditional way. He rejects as “false opposites” a supposed contradiction between abstract art and realism. Sitting in his un-air-conditioned studio on the banks of Clear Creek one hot afternoon recently, he ruminated on such philosophical questions between drags on a Pall Mall cigarette.
“All art is automatically abstract,” Smith said. “My dog, Argus, wouldn’t understand that a statue 12 inches high represents a human being. It doesn’t smell like a human being or walk like a human being.
“Humans have a unique ability to think in abstract terms. A representational artist is always making abstractions of what is in nature when he carves a statue or paints a picture. This is because, as human beings, we always come to understand things in a roundabout way: ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like . . .’ We can start to know things through parables, through what philosophers call analogy.”
Smith said that despite the heat of his first Oklahoma summer, he likes living here.
“There are a lot more live music events than most places I’ve lived,” he said. “I enjoyed the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah. I really like the products of the Marshall and Choc breweries. And the chicken fried steak around here is to die for.”
Reach Kirk Kramer at 684-2901 or kkramer@muskogeephoenix.com.
Sculptor Andrew Smith stands near a plaster model of a capital he is carving to adorn the new monastic church under construction at Clear Creek Abbey on Roach Mountain, near Fort Gibson Lake in Cherokee County.
A plaster model of one of two “capitals,” the decorative element at the top of a column, Andrew Smith is carving at Clear Creek Abbey near Lost City, depicting the Annunciation.
Sculptor Andrew Smith works in his studio at Clear Creek Abbey near Lost City. Andrew has been commissioned to make carvings for the new monastic church. Observing is his brother, Innocent Smith, a Dominican friar visiting from Washington, D.C.
