Family of art
Graphic designer Neville Smith, artist Dodie Lewis and their photographer daughter Whitney share an exhibit
Neville Smith, the nationally renowned graphic designer, and his daughter Whitney LewisSmith, the rising photographer, are sitting at a table in Exposure Gallery, and talking about their shared love of nature and Whitney’s particular affinity for water.
Neville — it’s easier if I use first names on this story — is suggesting that Whitney loves the water so much because her mother, the artist Dodie Lewis, swam daily in Meech Lake until the week before Whitney was born. Water has a distinct sound when you’re submerged in it, and experts say a baby, days from birth, can hear sounds from outside the womb. This, perhaps, can create a person with a primordial attraction to water, be it river, lake or ocean. It can also be a launching pad for an intriguing exhibition by a family of three artists.
The III Show, at Exposure to June 11, includes new work by Neville, Dodie and Whitney, and it intrigues with its demonstration of how the art and inspiration of the parents has distilled into the art of their adult child.
Dodie and Neville are content to “celebrate” the nature around them, especially near their home outside Gatineau. They leave any subtext to their daughter, but they both push their art in new and highly personal directions, a luxury they seem to be granting themselves after long careers.
“Drawing is something I’ve loved to do since I was six years old,” says Neville, whose best-known designs have ranged from the famous Black Cat Café logo and poster to the final version of the maple leaf on the Canadian flag. Drawing was, obviously, always key to his design career, but now he draws frequently for its own sake. “I want to get back to my roots, which really comes from drawing.”
His works in The III Show are simple and strong. He has line drawings of a heron swallowing a lizard almost as big as itself, and another of a dog’s eyes and nose that is about as economical as a drawing can be. His drawings of chickadees are more detailed. He started with a digital print of a sketch and filled it in with coloured pencil, and the result is a delicate bird made large and powerful.
Dodie has made an even bigger leap, from portraits to installation boxes.
“I always did commissioned portraiture, forever,” she says in a phone interview. “Now I want to find another way to express myself.
“It’s a real departure, and I don’t even know where it’s going ... They’re not things that I think necessarily will sell, but I just decided to do work that I wanted to do, and that I would want to have.”
What she wants to have is a vertical box, approximately 48 inches tall and 12 inches wide, that houses a sort of dioramic homage to moths, “these incredible creatures.”
She started with five larger-than-life photographs of some of the largest moths in Ontario, including the otherworldly luna moth, that she then painted to add “more power and strength.” She set the moths on a rough tree trunk that began as photograph she took of pollen on water, then covered with oil or pastel to create a mottled, decaying surface. Like Neville’s drawings, Dodie’s box of moths is evidently the work of an artist who finds harmony and beauty in nature.
Having grown up with such parents, it’s no surprise that the state of nature is a worry for Whitney, and her photographs make it known in spectacular fashion. As seen in her 2011 show Amarantos, she’s once again re-animating dead creatures, though this time with political overtones.
The dramatically posed stuffed animals of Amarantos have been replaced by schools of dead fish that seem to swim about. She gathered the fish and set up scenes in her studio to shoot with a large, glass-plate camera.
The retro technology and the scenes she built give the
‘It’s a real departure, and I don’t even know where it’s going ... They’re not things I think necessarily will sell, but I just decided to do work that I wanted to do ...’
DODIE LEWIS Artist
photographs a vintage feel, as if destined to hang in a Victorian parlour, though the message they deliver is unfortunately contemporary. The seas are dying because we are reckless stewards, she’s saying. As she notes in our interview, in 50 years we’ll be eating jellyfish because there’ll be nothing else left in the oceans.
Whitney’s stark message mixes well with the unabashed wonder of her parents’ works, offering a joint message of what we have and risk losing. Not everything in the show works so well — Dodie’s “dreamlike” portrait of Whitney as a girl seems too sentimental and personal, and Neville and Dodie’s mixed-media collaborations for the most part left me puzzled. Yet all three members of the Lewis-Smith family have worked together to make something that is universal, meaningful and beautiful.