I build copper frogs. Not just any old frogs: really cool ones, as you will see from this book. My medium is known as direct metal sculpture, which means that I work directly with the metal rather than cast pieces. I weld, braze, cut, beat, and shape metal, primarily copper. I got into this work through my father, also a sculptor. He designed the prototype, a large, human-sized copper frog, many years ago, in the early eighties.
Some background: I began sculpting and making art at an early age. My father, a direct metal sculptor, of course influenced me. Besides being a sculptor, he also has a PhD. in Thermodynamics. So he has the mind of a scientist and engineer as well as that of an artist. I also had the influence of his mother, my grandmother--Gammy, as I had named her when I was little (and the name stuck: We all called her that).
Gammy was an accomplished watercolorist. She never quite made a living at it. She taught art at a prestigious girl's elementary school and also depended on income from my grandfather, who had a successful natural gas business that he eventually sold before we kids had even been born. My grandmother did, however, exhibit regularly, primarily at a small but successful gallery across from the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston, S.C., where I am from, and where my family of origin still lives.
Gammy was an exceptional watercolorist. I hope to in the near future make a book of her paintings. Her work deserves that. Anyway, she had always encouraged my art, as did my parents. When I went to art school, Gammy was thrilled.
My mother had an artistic bent that went more in the direction of literature, an area in which she has some accomplishment. She did post-graduate work in Shakespeare at N.C. State, taught high school English, and later went to Italy to train in the Montessori Method, got certified, and has for over a decade been a Montessori teacher, an administrator, and on occasion, a principal. My mother can devour a book quicker than anyone I know, including my wife, who is also a fast reader. I, sadly, am not.
Be that as it may, I was reading Shakespeare--all on my own, at all hours of the night up in bed with a tome of his works--when I was eight or nine. I didn't understand old Will, but I liked the way he sounded. Early on, I had a love of books and writing. From that love, this book came into being. And from my love of books and writing, I expect many of my manuscripts to see publication--sooner than later, I hope.
Back to the Frogs. It started this way: A certain patron of my father's, a retired diplomat who lived on Seabrook Island, suggested Dad sculpt a frog. Dad complied. The first frog looked nothing like the prototype he eventually came to, months later, but it was successful enough for Dad to feel he had something. He built other Frogs, perfecting the design. Fairly quickly, the E.T. look of the first Frog disappeared. Dad's Frog morphed into something much more recognizable as a frog, an anthropomorphized frog, to be exact: a cartoon frog, a walking, talking, how-do-you-do frog a la Jim Henson's Kermit and Warner Brother's Michigan Frog.
By the way, I don't think in the beginning he studied those cartoon renderings. And whether they influenced him, I don't know. I do know that he gave a lot of attention to actual frogs. He has, in his house, at least one skeleton of a frog. I mean, the guy is serious about his craft. One might say obsessed, as, from the outside, the creative process often looks (like an obsession, which it can be).
And then… These Frogs Dad was building sold well. Like the proverbial hotcakes. After that, Dad made only Frogs, with a few exceptions along the way. Most of Dad's Frogs were of the human-sized variety. That was part of their charm, that they were so human as well as so froggy.
Artistic note alert: Having sculpted for decades, I have come to understand things about the medium of sculpture. You can do certain things in sculpture and other things you cannot do. For example, have you noticed that Daffy Duck and Donald Duck don't have wings except when they are trying to fly? They don't have wings. They have hands, and you accept it because those ducks are animations, and at any time you know they can have wings. You accept that the arms and hands are stand-ins for the wings. This you cannot as easily get away with in sculpture. You must rather make the wings act as arms or make the arms look wing-like. In a similar way, with sculpture, the actual size matters when it comes to anthropomorphizing. You don't think about size in an animation. Warner Brother's Michigan Frog can be any size, can be a small frog made to look human. But in the medium of sculpture, a frog-sized sculpture does not convey the warmth and human feeling you get in a human-sized animal.
Don't get me wrong. I am not making a case for building only large, human-sized frogs. I also build smaller frogs, and I think they are wonderful. What I am saying is that the large Frogs have a human quality that is impossible to achieve in smaller work.
To get on with my story: After Dad had been building one Frog after another and making a living at it, my brother and I smelled the money. My brother (I only have one, a younger brother by 4 years; his name is Alexander—Zan for short) had studied accounting in college. But when he got out of school he decided he wanted to be an artist. He turned to making Dad's Frog. He, like me, had grown up learning direct metal sculpture techniques (primarily brazing) from Dad. Like me, from time to time Zan worked in Dad’s studio.
I went to Rhode Island School of Design to become a professional artist. Afterward, after a string of odd jobs including waiting tables, sanding Bondo peanuts for a commercial for an animation company, and doing paste-up work at a local newspaper, The Woodstock Times, (I was living in upstate New York then), I, as well, turned to Dad's Frog to make a living. (Lucky for Dad, he had only two sons.)
The rest is history. Well, that may be putting it boldly. We aren’t exactly famous, in the household-name sense of the term anyway, although our Frogs have received much acclaim and reside in many public places across the US and abroad, as well as in countless private collections. A children’s museum in Honduras has a permanent installation of fifteen Frogs. An elementary school near New York’s Wave Hill sculpture gardens (a site of one of our exhibits) has a large permanent collection, as does the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, where my brother, father, and I have had several Spring shows. The acclaimed gardens of Quebec’s Les Quatre Vents have a large collection of Dad’s Frogs, and highlight his work in The Greater Perfection, a book about the gardens. The city of Smyrna has four of my Frogs in its downtown area. My Frogs have been in commercials and advertisements. Our Frogs are continually photographed. Several of my Frogs provided a backdrop for a performance by Travis Tritt at the 1995 Country Music Awards. This is to name but a few of our credits. My main credit, I believe, is that I have been making a living for over 15 years sculpting large copper Frogs. Most of my work has been collected across the US. But pieces have also been collected from abroad.
If mimicry is the highest form of flattery, we, my brother, father, and I, should feel very flattered: I have seen many artisans attempt to copy our work. And fail. Enough said about that.
As far as materials are concerned, I work with non-corrosive metals, which means that the work is permanent. It is also durable, well-reinforced and, in that respect, comparable to a bronze. I usually treat the sculptures to a variegated verdigris patina that is also permanent and durable--to the extent that any patina is durable. Patinas on any metal are subject to scratching and wearing off: If, for example, something such as water repeatedly hits the sculpture over a period of time, that will wear off the patina. Further, I do not finish the metal with any spray or acrylic coating or anything such as that. This is counter to the natural quality of the metal outdoors (or indoors, for that matter). The patina can change slightly over time, and this is due to the make-up of the air and rain in a given region. No, cold will not damage the patina or any other part of the sculpture. Nor will heat, unless extreme—a blowtorch, say. In other words, my Frog sculptures are permanent and durable.
Before I finish talking, one word about the pictures in this book: I have done some photo-editing work on many of them. Most of the photos I worked with are from my personal stock of photos of my work, which is to say, most of the photos are snapshots. Some snapshots are better than others. On more than one occasion, I had to work with photos of abysmal quality. If I ever become a professional photographer, I will get some better cameras. Actually, digital cameras have made the snapshot obsolete. Nowadays anyone can easily take a very fine photograph. But that hasn’t always been true, and I am working with photographs that I have accumulated from work I have produced over many years.
Another reason I have doctored up certain photographs is to emphasize their sculptural quality. And, admittedly, I’ve also played with some pictures because I am an artist and I find this two-dimensional expression of my sculptures an art form in itself. So enjoy. And give serious consideration today to becoming a proud and happy owner of a Beau Smith Frog.
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Posted on Thursday 30 of June, 2005 [06:40:29 UTC]
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