A painter and consummate block printer, Virginian Charles William Smith captured the charms of the old South in sharp black and white images before experimenting with new techniques and abstraction towards the end of his career. He was also the author of several illustrated volumes which served to bring widespread visibility to his work.
Smith was born in Lofton, Virginia, but spent parts of his childhood in Sherando and nearby Waynesboro. In a 1968 interview he recalled this about his grandmother’s house: “When the quilts were hung on a clothesline for airing they made a handsome exhibition.” His father worked as a pattern maker for a stove company carving designs on wooden blocks. Young Smith apprenticed at a foundry and did similar work. During the summer of 1911 he took art classes at the University of Virginia with Alon Bement, noted art educator and mentor to Georgia O’Keeffe. He continued his studies at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and then in 1915 moved on to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. However, World War I interrupted his studies; he served with distinction and attained the rank of first lieutenant in the 56th field artillery brigade. Following the conclusion of the war he remained abroad and studied in Paris with René Ligeron, a rather traditional painter of landscapes and cityscapes.
Returning to the states in 1923, Smith taught in Waynesboro, at Fairfax Hall, a junior college and finishing school for young women. Two years later he settled in Richmond, where his linoleum block prints of the historic city garnered favorable reviews. That same year, 1925, he published his first book, Linoleum Block Printing, followed four years later with one focusing on Richmond. In these scenic views he managed to create a visual dialogue between rectilinear elements such as buildings and organic ones like trees and bushes. In 1928 and 1929 he was an instructor in advertising at the Richmond campus of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. In the early 1930s became involved in the revival of the Richmond Academy of Art and Sciences, founded in 1786, indicative of a burgeoning interest in art which culminated in the founding of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the mid-thirties.
In 1933 Smith’s book Old Charleston was published, the result of an extended sojourn in the city. He wrote in the introduction: “Charleston, the historic city with quaint streets and with side entrances leading to spacious verandas—the old city with architecture of great and rare charm found nowhere else in America. This was the scene I visualized when opportunity called me to the City by the Sea.” The following year he began to alternate winter months in New York teaching at The New School of Social Research and summer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where he was the director of the summer art program.
In 1938 he joined the art faculty at Bennington College, in Vermont, “the first college to include the visual and performing arts as an equal partner in the liberal arts curriculum, [where] painters and sculptors gathered on its campus to redefine the visual arts canon.” Smith continued to teach there until 1946. During this period, he turned to abstraction, inventively employing shapes cut from old wood blocks and printing them singly so that in fact they are monotypes. Using the third person he described his approach in Abstractions by Charles Smith: “His present work—color abstractions—has developed from his use of wood block as a medium of expression. The method used in producing these abstractions is original with him and is briefly this: the forms are of maple wood block (some of metal or other material) are cut to designs drawn on the block. The abstractions are created by applying color to these forms and pressing them on paper or other material, one at a time, until the abstraction is completed. The textures and colors are controlled by the amount of color applied and the varying pressure. The forms are used over and over in different combinations.”
Returning to his roots in 1946, he joined the faculty at the University of Virginia and was chairman of the art department beginning in 1952, serving there until his retirement in 1963. Still committed to publishing his work, he issued two more illustrated books: Experiments in Relief Printing in 1954 and two years later My Zoological Garden, a somewhat whimsical collection of small animals.