Barbara uses various materials – paint, collage and stitching – to create artworks that draw inspiration from the world around her
By Anna-Rhesa Versola | Photography by John Michael Simpson
Barbara Lee Smith grew up to defy the expectations of her post-World War II generation when women were not encouraged to become independent professionals.
“The idea that at some point in my life I would travel around the world to teach and show my work – I hadn’t a clue that that would ever even be a possibility,” she says. “So, I look back on it and think, ‘Wow, I got lucky along the way.’”
Barbara uses various materials – paint, collage and stitching – to create her abstract artworks. Her favorite textile is Lutradur, an industrial interfacing material used to back automobile upholstery as one of its different applications, which is made in Durham by Freudenberg Performance Materials. “It looks like rice paper,” she says. “It’s tough as nails.”
Barbara finds inspiration in liminal spaces where edges meet and colors mingle, like when tides swell and retreat, and she walks along wet sands and sees what is left behind. She translates her feelings of connection to nature with layers of painted and fused nonwoven fibers.
“I’ve just found that the materials and color are very important to me,” she says. “One of the things I love about working with textiles is that you have extraordinary variety in colors because of different kinds of threads, different kinds of interactions of the threads with the painted fabric.”
Rather than use a paintbrush, Barbara “draws” with the needle of a vintage Legacy 1 quilting machine she calls “the monster.” She considers the different painted scraps “brushstrokes.”
“The machine is a huge part of the construction of the work, because it both literally and visually holds everything together,” she says. Barbara has lost count of the miles of thread she has used for her projects over the years. The effect can be mesmerizing, like a topographical map of color and depth.
“People want to get close to [see] the work, and that’s the way I construct the work,” she says. Like the ebb and flow of water, Barbara approaches her studio wall, pins a painted fragment and steps back to have a look. She repeats this dance until her composition speaks to her. “And that’s the way people do,” she says. “They come up, and they go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, it’s not paper. Oh, it’s not painting, what is it?’ And then they back up. I like that.”
Inside her light-filled loft apartment at the American Tobacco Campus, Barbara experiments with ideas and compositions, pulling scraps of material from her extensive collection of leftovers from earlier works. A large, finished piece covers the wall above her sofa. Light from the window reveals the texture of layers held together by sinuous lines of colored thread. “Go ahead,” she says, encouraging a tactile connection to the piece. “You can’t hurt it.
“Some works lend themselves to look more like water or sand or rocks or hills or grasses or sky,” she says. “I work to share my ideas about life in general and the importance of nature and healing, and to get people out of whatever is going on for a little while, and allow [them] to have a whole different moment or two, or three, of engagement. I mean, taking a deep breath, just seeing something in a new way. I think it’s big; it’s important.”
Oh, to be surrounded by art; I am surrounded by friends.
Barbara Lee Smith
A Portrait of the Artist
Barbara was the youngest of three siblings born to a minister father and a church secretary mother. She grew up in different cities where coastal landscapes imprinted on her subconscious. One memorable home, originally built as a private gambling clubhouse, was a 23-room Victorian manse just six blocks from the ocean in Cape May, New Jersey. Her parents bought the home in 1949 and converted it into a summer rooming house. That same year, Barbara saw a Life magazine article about Jackson Pollock. “That left an impression,” she says.
After raising a blended family with her late husband, John Melvin “Mel” Smith, Barbara earned her master’s in mixed media at Northern Illinois University. In 1991, she published a book, “Celebrating the Stitch: Contemporary Embroidery of North America.” Her finished pieces hang in many esteemed places, including the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
