Jean Smith Paintings

April 22, 2008 -- Malachi Series created for Art Auctions in Battle Ground and Olympia Washington which raised $245 for Books For Prisoners.

Chicago, November 2006 -- Malachi Ritscher lit himself on fire to protest the war in Iraq. Malachi was part of the thriving jazz scene in Chicago -- he recorded live shows.

Malachi Series

APRIL 8, 2007

I wrote a piece for a book project about touring -- the piece I wrote is about being on tour as 9-11 was happening. We were in Boston that night. Our 9-12 NYC show was cancelled. We proceeded towards NYC on 9-13, playing across the river from Manhattan, at Maxwell's in Hoboken. The three circles in the paintings are ground zero, Maxwell's, and, on 9-14, we went to Princeton and had a coffee in an ice cream parlour, wondering what flavour of ice cream Einstein liked. Strawberry? For some time it was thought that Einstein's brain had a higher concentration of glial cells -- which are important in how nuerons function. This theory was discounted in a study that revealed his brain weighed a little less than average, yet his parietal lobes -- vital to math and spacial reasoning -- were 15% wider than than most other brains.



9-11 Series
Tempera on 8 1/2 X 11" paper
unframed




9-11 #1





9-11 #2





9-11 #3





9-11 #4



NOVEMBER, 2006

Lake Cottages in Winter Series
8 1/2 X 11" acrylic on paper
unframed




Lake Cottages in Winter #1 -- SOLD




Lake Cottages in Winter #2



Lake Cottages in Winter #3



Lake Cottages in Winter #4


This series is inspired by cottages I saw while vacationing on Cape Cod this past summer and by rock critic Evelyn McDonnell's new book -- a memoir -- which illuminates her punk rock rebellion from cookie cutter mid-westernism. I don't have much experience with lakes, having always been drawn to the sea. As a kid I thought lakes were a questionable destination, a far second to the sea -- the Levis of bodies of water; I preferred Lees. Once I got my skinny 10-year-old foot caught between the planks of a wharf at a lake and thoughts of the tide coming in, up and over me, filled my head.

Here, as I gave each cottage its private wharf and trail of chimney smoke, I was thinking about class and community. Painting #1 has strange vertical lines from where I set it on the rack in the oven to dry under the broiler and moved quickly to #2, letting #1 get too hot. The paint didn't want to adhere to the rack lines. I tried to make them moonlight across the snow and the lake, but hey, we would have to be on a planet with multiple moons to make that believable, as the lines don't follow in to one light source. The lines became boundaries and borders. Three would be a more compositionally correct number to have selected to deal with, but four seems to press the point of convention -- even, not odd. I remember my parents had a Burl Ives record with a drawing of little houses on the cover, Little Boxes, all made of ticky-tacky. There have been other multiple cabins, identical huts and cottage colonies in my life -- usually they appear in summer, seen from the road. To me, this image represents a weighing of communist uniformity against capitalist excess -- Kafka's Amerika mixed up with Ry Cooder's Cuban / Americana guitar.

(note: April, 2007 I think I just wanted to say "vacationing on Cape Cod" -- did I mention the lobsters and my $50 a night motel room on the beach?)