Oregon Art Beat; #303; Arvie Smith

Okay, go ahead and take it off. Okay now, put it back up. Good. Make sure that the mic is still exposed. Okay, well now, do now is I'm trying to organize the composition. It's got some things that are pretty well in place and now I'm going to see if it works. I like to listen to

the brush strokes as I make the brush stroke. It's you paint with everything, not just your arms and hands, but your paint with your whole body and all your senses. Oh, layer upon layer before I get it to kind of where I want it. It does or it doesn't. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to maintain the kind of emotion I felt when I heard about this happening in my hometown. And I try to keep that going while I'm painting.

And then I just do what the painting dictates. It sort of starts talking to me after one. So if I start talking to myself, I'm not really talking to you, I'm talking to this guy. Okay, just your arms. Underneath here in part of the under painting. And when oil paint dries, things start coming through. So I'm sort of relying on that. So I'm really kind of hiding that. And then the viewer is going to discover it as the painting dries and it'll come more and more to focus. Like this guy with the buck teeth. And then I'm going to start talking to myself.

Reputation up to the viewer. That's their half. Yeah. But in the town where I grew up, that whole racist bigoted kind of attitudes or passed down from father to son.

So I'm putting in this football to kind of talk about that. Really like a hand on the Bible. Yeah, well, it's a Bible belt. Yeah. So you can tell your father now you did do it. I know. I thought about you when I started doing this. Put a little nut in the background if you just throw it away. Can I borrow that nut for a minute? Oh, I've got a couple of habits. I'll just come and borrow one for you. Okay. That makes our own, you know, teeth out of that. Huh. But let's see the oil, huh? Yeah. Yeah. That will do it. Sign up

just for what I want to do for that. I had a job once making paints. I loved it. The guy with the guy give would give me the option of getting paid and money or hard paints that I always took the paints. Generally, in an ordinary job, payday doesn't really mean that much to me. It's just, you know, how you survive. But paints, that's a whole different story.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I tried to use it someplace else so that

it doesn't isolate. I've got this big green here and no place else in the composition. And it won't unify. So you have to put in other places. So if I introduce a new color, I've got most of the colors in here. But if I introduce, if I introduce say, oh, purple. Purple. Okay. Introduce purple. And you've got to mention that purple is elsewhere as well. What if you wanted to use it just for, you know, a bold accent and not have any place else? Right. Right. You can only do that one or two times. Or you run out of colors. Yeah. Or you run out of bold accents. God, you can tell that he's a teacher. He keeps giving me instructions. Yeah. Oh, okay. We've got to get you in there.

Oh. Okay. Okay.

Okay. Maintaining the

emotion, I think it's the hardest part. But necessary. Yeah. Mm -hmm. You get lost in it. But yeah, it has to be there. When I paint it. Strange fruit. The one that we were talking about earlier. I played Billy Holiday's strange fruit throughout the whole painting. I drove my studio part. It's nuts. Turn that thing off. But you don't take that anger home with you. You're able to leave it all on campus. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's how I deal with it. What was the name of the man who was lynched? James Bird. James Bird. That's right. As the story goes, walking home from a party and a

couple of guys that he knew. Let me give you a lift home. But they were really out looking for a black man to kill. And he happened to be there. Unbelievable. And he was, Mr. Bird was an older man, wasn't he? 49. Yeah, his mom was thinking 50 something. Mm -hmm. And these guys were in their 30s, 34, 35. So they're not kids. They knew what they were doing. What possible excuse did they offer up? It was all the other guys fault. We didn't know he was going to do that. I just kicked him

a couple of times. Oh, well, that is. I've taken a little, well, quite a few. I've painted him in sort of a menstrual because black people aren't really taken seriously for the most part. You know, they're kind of dehumanized. And that's kind of the image that you get. It's very tight. But when some black people find out if that's him, they painted him as an extra? Oh, perhaps. But again, I do what my art dictates. If I fit all my life word about, gee, it's somebody going to get mad at me if I do this. I can't work that way. You know, they just get mad at me. Hopefully, I would hope that they would understand what I'm trying to say. But perhaps not. That's their part. I'm doing my part now.

I'm doing my part now. I'm doing my part now. I'm doing my part now. One of, oh, seven years ago, one of the producers from a public TV station took me down into Orleans. It's the first time I've ever been in New Orleans. And that was going to do the Mardi Gras. So I was the artist on the balcony doing the

Mardi Gras. And I saw these kids with taps on their tennis shoes. You know, it's a real music -oriented town. But yeah, I didn't like that. But they're black. Black, black kids. But that's part of that culture. So whether I like it or not, it doesn't really matter. It was what they do. There's some. But do you, a little bit too much about Daniel Robinson? A little bit too much for me. You know, to have the father and the bathroom handing out tiles and teaching his son how to do it was a bit much for me. I didn't quite. I was having a hard time with that.

And there's, oh, on one of those Star Trek movies, I think it's the bored people. And they say, that is the order of things. I'm not really sure I wouldn't accept that. Like I told you with my mom, what are you doing? I

don't know. I don't know. Okay. Okay.

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