Up in Big Sur, out in the woods, there’s a woman staring at a river, watching it, observing the light reflecting off the water, seeing the river-worn stones under the surface, experiencing the ripples and eddies and currents as they dance under the sunlight filtering through the trees. Her name is Abigail Smith, and she’s showing eight small paintings of the Big Sur River at Cambria’s Cruise Control Contemporary gallery (1075 Main St.) through Feb. 10.
Originally from Templeton, Smith was drawn to Big Sur.
“My sister and I would go backpacking up here, just drive up for a weekend because it’s not very far, and I really fell in love with the land and spending time out in nature here,” Smith explained in a Zoom interview. “There’s something that just felt like my heart connected with it. And even when I was younger, I was like, I’m gonna live there one day.”
After a couple of years spent studying art at Cuesta College, Smith moved to the Midwest to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose notable alumni include Georgia O’Keeffe, Grant Wood, Ivan Albright, Thomas Hart Benton, LeRoy Neiman, Jeff Koons, and Shel Silverstein, among others.
“Then I came back, and I didn’t really know how to live here because it’s a weird place to live. It’s not like moving to a normal place. There’s minimal housing, minimal jobs. I ended up applying to a couple of random jobs and was like, if it works out, it’ll work out.”
These days Smith supports her artistic practice by working as a sales associate at The Phoenix Shop at Nepenthe, where she also tends the property’s garden.
Does she want to paint full time?
“Yeah, I have a vague dream of doing that one day. For the past couple of years, and especially after art school, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to like make money off my art and got kind of weirded out by the whole art world and the hustle of it,” she said. “I didn’t feel like I found my place in it, and I didn’t connect to how I could do that in a genuine way. Making money on art feels like that’s not my practice at all, so I’m still navigating that.
“I’m really grateful for this show coming up, whether or not I make money. It’s a nice way to be able to do the gallery thing, and [Cruise Control Contemporary owner] Charles [Smith] is so genuine and great to work with. And he actually loves art and really cares about artists and bringing it to the community.
“So yeah, we’ll see where it goes. Maybe I’ll never make money off of it, but I’m still gonna do it.”
You’d think attending art school, especially a prestigious one like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, would train you to be a practicing, moneymaking artist, but for Smith, it had the opposite effect.
“I went through an interesting time with art,” she recalled. “After being in art school and having so much judgment on me all the time—because it’s all critique based; we didn’t get grades—I got in that mindset and became really critical of my own work. Then, after art school, I didn’t even feel like I wanted to share it. I needed to reevaluate. ‘What’s my relationship with art outside art school?'”
Smith graduated in 2022, and she’s just now starting to feel like she can share her work with the public.
“I needed some time to work through my art myself, navigate things and figure out what I was doing with it, and just let myself be more free in it, and not have so much judgment, connect with it, maybe in my own way, outside of academics. I’m at a place where I feel excited and comfortable to share again.”
The eight oil paintings on wood panels she’s showing at Cruise Control in an exhibition called River are small, the biggest just 12 by 16 inches, and depict the surface of water.
“I’m super ride-or-die for oils,” she gushed. “I’m just obsessed with them.”
She works from her own photos in her tiny studio in her cabin.
“I work so slow that plein air painting is impossible for me. I’ve tried it, and the light moves really fast. So, I would love to explore that, but I haven’t been able to so far.”
What are the challenges of capturing the surface of water?
“Oh, it feels impossible to me,” Smith admitted. “I’m thinking that the entire time I’m painting, honestly. I really feel kind of lost, and every painting I’m thinking, I don’t know how to do this, like what the heck? I’m confused.”
Yet the results speak for themselves. She builds her tiny miracles of light and reflection like the river itself is constructed.
“I work in a lot of layers. I think that’s how water goes. You have the darker colors, the ground, the rocks, and then there’re layers of light beaming through the water. Then you have the ripples on top. Then you have little reflections on top. And that’s how I work my painting as well.”
Why work so small?
“I think that small paintings feel more technically challenging to me because I’m still trying to get the same amount of detail but then doing it really tiny. When I’ve painted bigger, I feel like it’s easier to get an image, but I’m really dedicated to small paintings. The small size lends itself to the ideas that I’m interested in, and these paintings feel very tender, soft, and intimate to me.”
That’s how she hopes people will experience her work.
“When the viewers see the paintings, they get a similar experience because they have to get close up, and it kind of draws you in. At least, that’s how I feel about other artists’ small paintings that I’ve seen. They feel like an invitation to slow down and look. You have to get intimate with it.”
Smith recalled encountering some small but potent Frida Kahlo paintings.
“They’re really small, and she is such a powerful painter and just such a badass lady, and I feel like I had already been making small work, and then, when I saw her small paintings, it felt like it validated me a little bit, and I thought, ‘OK, if she’s killing it with small paintings, I can do it, too.'” Δ
Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 16-26, 2025.