Portraits of the Southern Landscape
Words by Hank Smith
I grew up in a house perched on top of a ridgeline in the Blue Ridge Mountains, outside Lexington, Virginia. One of ten siblings, when we weren’t in school, we had our run of the mountain, free to explore every cut, hollow, and abandoned place; We forged a relationship with the land. Be it the sharp, jagged spine of the Shenandoah ridge where I shot my first deer or the dilapidated farmhouse of an incarcerated weed farmer, each place served as both teacher and classroom, a collision of the real and imaginary, the past and present.
I strive to paint with this perspective; not as a landscape artist but as a portraitist.
Inspired by gothic literature, I use landscape to shear southern culture, identity, and history from the artificial tethers of time and narrative. To study the South as it truly lurks, protruding from a red clay river bed or pockmarked by the deep dark shadows of a magnolia tree. The quivering and rolling face that stares back at you is distorted but reflected in the deep black water of Ghost River.
Acting as a third space, the landscape of the South undermines the reality-vs.-imaginary dualism of our modern lives - a space to explore the polymorphous nature of our southern experience. The landscape is not some inanimate object, but a living breathing character, haunted by the spirits of the South both past and present. Just as we have manipulated it, tilled, and formed it in our likeness, so too has this land done to us.
