Seven years ago, I sent an email to the painter Josh Smith to ask about a possible interview. Four years later, I received a one-line response: ‘I will do the interview sometime if you like’. From that moment, it was another three years before we were able to find an afternoon to meet this past winter.
As we discuss in the following interview, Smith is resistant to socialising, and prefers to spend long stretches of time in his Brooklyn home, a largely windowless warehouse he’s transformed into a live–work complex. Throughout the building’s two storeys, he’s set up several spaces for his art: a workshop for building, a ceramic studio with a kiln, a casual studio, mostly used for storage, and a primary painting studio with a ping-pong table “for exercise”. The house also contains multiple lounges, kitchens and a large art collection, which includes a piece by Mary T. Smith (no relation) in the bathroom, and a living room tiled with Haitian paintings.
On the day we spoke, Smith’s studio was empty of new work, but I was able to flip through a few stacks of paintings from the various series he’s made over his career. There were some grim reapers, tropical sunsets, fish, devils and monochromes, all rendered in his loose, full-armed strokes. Not present was his early work: the abstractions, the canvases he uses as palettes or the paintings of his own name, the ‘signature’ works that are most often associated with his success.
Smith usually paints in batches of highly specific, simple subject matter – fruit, animals, land-scapes, myths – which often have the appearance of being made feverishly and in the pursuit of honest, unmediated expression. He works in this same way across collage, bookmaking and clay, using seemingly arbitrary content as his engine for accreting material. Taken together, his work suggests one man recreating the fundamentals of painting.
For our interview, we settled into his library, walled with grey metal shelves and filled with books: art, fiction, poetry and history. In the middle of our talk, he pulled down a monograph of some American Colonial painters and opened it to a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. “I wish I could do portraits,” he said, “but I’d have to be more patient.”
After the interview, Smith brought me down to the basement, where he grows an impressive variety of leafy green vegetables. For ten minutes, he carefully snipped until he had stuffed a plastic baggie filled with lettuces and chards, which he gave me as parting gift.
Locked In
Ross Simonini We’re sitting in this library, surrounded by books, almost all of which are artbooks. Do you read these or just look at the pictures?
Josh Smith Mostly I just look. You know how you read an artbook: you open it, you look at a picture, you read what’s around the picture, then you kind of lose interest. And there are periods where I read a lot. Like a lot. But that’s when I’m not smoking, not using, you know, any pot or anything.
RS Smoking isn’t good for reading?
JS Not even a little. I get hung up on every word and everything becomes so intensely interesting for me that I can’t make any progress. But other times, I’ll take a load of artbooks upstairs and read.
RS You get your input from books.
JS Yeah, because you need gas to keep going. I mean, you can see from the books around us, it’s a collage of everything I love.