Circles and Roots: A Visit to Eric Drummond Smith’s “Big Ugly Hullabaloo”
When you go, pay attention to the circles. I’ve known Eric Drummond Smith and his art for many years, I’ve admired his work when displayed at Wolf Hills Brewery and the William King Museum of Art, and yet somehow I’d never been attentive to the circles. Circles fill Eric’s figures, a kind of filigree holding them in decorative motion, evoking the great metalwork and manuscript illumination of the early Middle Ages. Some of them have a cross inside, some a five- or six-pointed star, some an eye, some concentric circles, some dots, some a floret. Like medieval icons, Eric’s figures are fixed against solid backgrounds, motionless, yet those circles give them constant activity. They’re like the Chinese jar in TS Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” which though “still / Moves perpetually in its stillness,” which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a big ugly hullabaloo.
Eric’s solo show is a delight from start to finish, lovingly curated and full of surprises. From the artist’s paint-splattered tee shirt and shorts to a display of sketches and studies for the show’s massive centerpiece, we are welcomed not only to the paintings and prints themselves, but also to their creator. If you don’t know Eric already, you’ll know him pretty well by the time you’ve perused this show. He’s there in the main piece, his tiny self-portrait in black and white tucked into a massive, vivid mural of “The Original Bristol State Line All-Star Hellfire Jazz and Blues Society & Club.” He places the self-portrait inside the gaping maw of a dragon (who looks a little like a Chinese dragon), surrounded by a band of demons; outside the dragon’s mouth, licked by flames, four haloed jazz skeletons join in. It’s exactly where he wants to be, and exactly where he wants us to find him: right where the action is, at the intersection of heaven and hell, surrounded by good music.
This large mural, a commission for a new speakeasy in Bristol, also reveals something about Eric’s art in general. The distinctive style of these paintings, which he calls “pop-surrealist, neo-expressionist,” has far wider roots than may immediately meet the eye. The diabolical band in the dragon’s jaws stands on its own, but it’s also in a whimsical conversation with an ancient tradition depicting Hell as the open mouth of a dragon. I don’t know whether Eric had this image specifically in mind, but compare the State Line Club to the image of hell for the Office of the Dead in the fifteenth-century Hours of Catherine of Cleves. Eric’s art is utterly unique, but it is connected to so, so much else.
I use “wider” for the roots of this work, because these roots spread so far out. The word for spreading roots, rhizomes, is used by philosophers to describe the way that networks of knowledge spread in ways that don’t follow rules or hierarchies. Eric’s artistic roots are rhizomatic, not least because they don’t just come from art; they include literature, philosophy, jazz, liquor, theology, Appalachia, the blues, beer, old time religion, and Virginia’s Fighting Ninth congressional district. It’s all there, and these paintings take us in multiple directions because most of them are full of words as well as images. The cursive text here is like the circles; words fill the spaces around the figures, and they bring the images to life. Reading the words means moving your head, having to scan to find where a line picks up, continually changing your perspective on the whole. (Curator Anna Buchanan has provided the text for each, and several times this helped me sort it out.)
Just as you have to move physically to follow the text in the paintings, the text and image then move you through cultures and ideas, through time and space, the references coursing along the rhizomes and bringing disparate things together. Eric says that he looks for “joyful dissonances and unexpected melodies,” and that’s precisely what we find in both the individual images and the exhibit. “Peter Pumpkinhead,” for example, is a fine fellow who followed Greeks and Christians and Daoists and poets and Sufis, as he “roared at injustice and smiled at his enemies,” the words swirling around him like the circles on his pumpkin head. Or again on the “Ballyhoo,” tucked under a tail we find “I am reminded of icthyosaurs and kelpies when his tail slaps the water, a Mesopotamian snare drum, bane of crocodiles when he is drunk on wine & memory.” Right there, in a single short phrase, paleontology and cryptozoology and ancient history and music illuminate the wild sea dweller on the canvas.
Every image does this, and so do the arrangements in the gallery. The four horsemen of the apocalypse look across at the Hellmouth, and you may notice that the four skeletal jazzmen are wearing the same colors as the four riders; a holy skeleton and a demon and a drinking pig form a triptych; Batman and Batboy, King David and Old King Cole are near neighbors. From an ecclesiastical standpoint, the ecumenism is also impressive, with a Presbyterian Great Minotaur, a Lutheran winged mouse, a horse who preaches at a tent revival, and a Dang Ol’ Pussycat in a Fancy Suit who is “headed to Wednesday night dinner at the First United Methodist Church.”
(Okay, I admit it: Eric told me that the jazz skeletons are also the four horsemen, jamming apocalyptically. I completely missed it.)
These disparate voices compose the hullabaloo, and it’s appropriate that Eric chose this auditory term, rather than a visual mélange or a culinary masala to describe the rhizomatic mixture. Many voices are here, and a great deal of music, and they resonate in a particular place. References to Appalachia abound, from Knoxville Tigers to the Kerberos in West Virginia, and as the Tree of Knowledge proclaims, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit.” If Appalachia gathers the voices of the big ugly hullabaloo, it also gives these characters distinctive accents and personalities. Strange as they may be, there is no stranger in this exhibit. Once you’ve met them, you’ve heard them speak, and they all sound a little familiar. Some of them are friends, and some of them are even family, these “gentle beings and martyrs” around the walls.
And it’s here that I find the joyous power of the exhibit: Eric’s creations are far more than the sum of their parts, impressive as those parts are. They are people, shaped by many things; they have hopes and desires, they’re ridiculous and noble, they love music and food, they’re us. And they are unified by Eric’s generous vision of humanity.
It’s an unfair advantage to know Eric personally, but if you do, you know that he loves you just like he loves each critter on display. I have rarely known someone who takes such delight in others, and welcomes them into his own unique world. And this is not just true for people here in the flesh, but all the Chinese philosophers and blues singers and dinosaurs and theologians and politicians and jazz musicians and Appalachian cryptobeasts and painters whose work he imbibes. His is a unique gift of life, being the first person treated with his own bone marrow for aplastic anemia, and it’s a gift that he shares with each of us in this exhibit.
Eric used to post lengthy accounts of his dreams on Facebook, and these always astonished me with their breadth and detail and sheer weirdness. This exhibit is a waking dream, and all the connections are bound together in the dreamer himself. You can see Eric in the little self-portrait in the mural, but you can also see him in every figure and every circle and every word. And he’s inviting you to the Big Ugly Hullabaloo.
