Smith's "Road to Wainscott" Leads to Amagansett

[caption id="attachment_64641" align="alignnone" width="3600"] Artist Fred Smith, photographed next to one of his artworks at the Amagansett Library. Michael Heller photo[/caption]

By Joan Baum

At an age most people have long since retired — or expired — 92-year-old Frederick Rutledge Smith is about to make his debut as a watercolorist. Although he had a long and fame-filled career in magazine publishing, which he writes about with engaging simplicity in his memoir, “The Road to Wainscott,” Mr. Smith’s upcoming exhibit at Amagansett Free Library will be his first as a serious watercolor artist of sea and landscapes, still life and abstracts. He credits his “super teacher,” the painter and sculptor Michael Rosch, with whom he studies at The Art Barge, saying that without Mr. Rosch’s “skillful guidance,” there would be no Amagansett show. In Mr. Smith’s view, Mr. Rosch knows how to challenge students, “probing the incompetent, getting tough with the competent.”

Years earlier, Mr. Smith had taken watercolor lessons at Guild Hall but confesses he wasn’t “diligent.” For a while after that, he participated in a small art group in Wainscott organized by Pia Lindstrom to sketch and paint East End garden sites and make Christmas cards. His last consistent effort, he writes, was in 2007, when he was renting a house in the village of Roussillon, in Provence, and did some paintings while also learning how to make his own tempera and water colors. But it was not until he started classes at The Art Barge in 2014 under the direction of Mr. Rosch that Mr. Smith felt he could come into his own. And did, at least to judge from his receiving The Art Barge’s Best of Summer Award in 2016 for a 16” x 20” painting, “Pikes Peaches.” Mr. Rosch “inspired and tough-taught me how to turn a watercolor from mud into a picture worth framing and hanging, and perhaps selling,” Mr. Smith says, then smiles, noting that two of the 40 pictures in the Amagansett show have already sold.

Mr. Smith is delighted with the whole exhibition enterprise — from deciding what to paint, to selecting the blond wood frames, to determining picture arrangement upstairs and downstairs in the library. He chose to group by genre: East End scenes, still life, pictures from travel memories (skiing in the Alps, in particular) and abstracts. Though he started out doing still life at The Art Barge, Mr. Rosch prompted him to do land and sea scape, working from photos (surf casting is a favorite subject). Was it all right to use photos taken by someone else, Mr. Smith wondered. “You’re not translating, you’re transforming,” responded Mr. Rosch. And so Smith proceeded, selecting parts of published pictures that appealed to him — “scraps” — and then, in painting, intensifying colors, simplifying compositions and adding texture. To make clouds and waves, for example, he learned how to use “rubber cement resist,” a technique that involves dribbling cement, which acts as a barrier to paint, then applying watercolor, and finally rubbing off of the cement, leaving pure white underneath. Mr. Smith also became a fan of Payne’s Gray, named after the English watercolorist (d. 1830) who invented the dark blue-gray tint, often used in place of black or as a mixer, to create subtle tones and shadows. Studying at The Art Barge, Mr. Smith says, “taught me to see better.”

As “The Road to Wainscott” may suggest, Mr. Smith’s road to watercolor was a natural path after a lifetime in magazine writing and editing and giving special attention to visual effects. In 1964 when he was at Sports Illustrated, he came up with the ingenious idea of an annual Swimsuit Issue. He was, he points out, “the only editor [at the magazine] who both selected photography and did layout, others being concerned with writing, not illustrating. In creating the Swimsuit Issue, of course, Mr. Smith hit a homerun, having figured out how to hold on to readers and ads in between the then-distinct fall and spring sports seasons: “Why not grab the third week in January, discover a winter resort in the sun and put a pretty girl on the cover?” Throughout his professional life Mr. Smith specialized in overseeing fashion, sports and travel stories which sharpened his eye. In 1962, he was the originator, producer and catalog writer of a summer-long exhibit at The Museum of Modern Art called “Design for Sport,” which included 110 objects of sports paraphernalia — baseballs and bats, hockey masks, sailplanes, racing surreys and cars. Diversity and innovation have always been at the center of his work.

Regarding the Amagansett show, Mr. Smith’s long-term companion, Bob Schaefer, affectionately, with a wink, admits he prefers Mr. Smith’s still life work the best but understands what his partner is getting at with the abstracts. Close friends for over three decades, they knew each other from various travel industry events and became skiing and tennis colleagues. Mr. Schaefer, who had been marketing director of The Leading Hotels of the World, had a weekend house in East Hampton (for a while he was an editor at The East Hampton Star). They came out regularly, but eventually Wainscott beckoned, Mr. Smith writes, an ideal place for “lazy retirement and free-lance magazine assignments.” And so it was that with the assistance of an architect friend in Sag Harbor that Bob and Fred turned their simple beach cottage into a permanent and comfortable home “furnished with art and things collected over lifetimes,” says Mr. Smith, many antiques from their family homes. They also became and still are active members of East End philanthropic and environmental organizations. “You can feel the impact of your efforts in a small community” says the Alabama-born author and artist. In that sense, the Amagansett show is loving testimony to that sentiment.

On the back cover of “The Road to Wainscott,” Mr. Smith has a photo of himself in 1955 demonstrating how to use a hula hoop. It’s a nice touch — witty and eccentric — and speaks presciently about this lively nonagenarian who despite succumbing to a number of ills that flesh is heir to, is still at it.

“40 Watercolors by Fred R. Smith” will be on exhibit at Amagansett Free Library, 215 Main Street, through June. Opening reception Friday, June 2 from 5 to 7 p.m.