The Michener Art Museum to Show Mavis Smith's Egg Tempera Paintings

Written by Sandra Heinemann Thursday, 29 December 2011 00:29

Doylestown, Pennsylvania.- You’re strolling down a busy sidewalk, absorbed in your thoughts. Suddenly someone walking the other way glances in your direction, you glance back, and your reverie is broken. Two souls meet, briefly, then the moment passes, and without breaking stride you each walk on. The paintings of Mavis Smith are about that moment, hinting at a narrative, yet remaining intentionally elusive. "Mavis Smith: Hidden Realities" will be on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum from January 14th through May 20th 2012 in the Fred Beans Gallery. Part storyteller, part portraitist and part stage director; the Bucks County resident and Trenton native creates images like single frames of a movie with no beginning and no end. Who are these mysterious figures, gazing at the world with enigmatic calm, surrounded by swimming pools, moody interiors and distant skies, portals to another world?

Smith, who earned a bachelor's degree from Pratt Institute in 1977, says they are not of any specific place. "I am trying to create an atmosphere from my mind," she says. Her fantasy environment is gleaned from travel, film, music and books. A career as a children’s book illustrator left her with a well-oiled imagination. "I don't start with a firm concept,” says Smith. “Your mind is open and you go into a trance and the ideas come in. I start out with a face or pose that intrigues me; then once I am caught up in the physical execution of the piece, other elements of the composition suggest themselves. The background elements usually evolve after I start painting." The faces of her subjects are porcelain-smooth, the eyes almond shaped. "I think what gives them that Botticelli quality is the medium," says Smith, who studied egg tempera at the Seattle Academy of Fine Art in 2002. Egg tempera was used by artists as diverse as Botticelli, Vermeer and Andrew Wyeth. The resulting images seem to radiate light from within, making the people who inhabit her luminous world slightly surreal.  "I've always been fascinated by the technique, having seen it at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Uffizi (in Florence).”


Egg tempera involves a process of building up hundreds of translucent layers. More durable than oil, egg tempera is made from powdered pigment and egg yolk mixed up fresh daily. It dries quickly, so 50 to 100 layers can be added in a day. "Each layer is pure color, and every layer affects the one beneath," says Smith. “Instead of an exhibition in a museum, think of this show as an archeological dig,” says the Michener’s Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest Chief Curator Brian Peterson. “As you slowly peel back the layers of earth, you start to uncover an arrowhead here, a shard of pottery there.  You ask yourself, ‘Who were these people?’ The deeper you dig, the more the clues pile up, and finally what was hidden seems within reach—until another layer of earth comes into view.” Smith has exhibited her work in Holland and Switzerland as well as Santa Fe, New York City, and at several venues in Bucks County. She has written 10 children’s books and illustrated more than 75.

In 1988, with the support of many dedicated citizens, the James A. Michener Art Museum opened as an independent, non-profit cultural institution dedicated to preserving, interpreting and exhibiting the art and cultural heritage of the Bucks County region. The Museum is named for Doylestown's most famous son, the Pulitzer-Prize winning writer and supporter of the arts who had first dreamed of a regional art museum in the early 1960's. In November of 1999, the James A. Michener Art Museum publicly announced the largest single gift in the institution's history. Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest gave the Museum an extensive collection of fifty-nine paintings by important regional artists of the Pennsylvania Impressionist School. The museum is now home to a world class collection of Pennsylvania Impressionist paintings. Ensconced in the Museum's walled, lush "back yard" is an outdoor gallery, the Patricia D. Pfundt Sculpture Garden. Sculptures are on view in a natural setting that pays homage to the Bucks County landscape which has inspired countless artists. The Museum hosts nationally touring special exhibitions and also showcases important regional artists. In its first two decades, the James A. Michener Art Museum has amassed a permanent collection of over 2,200 objects that reveal the rich artistic and cultural heritage of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, region. From Thomas Hicks' and Jonathan Trego's mid-nineteenth-century portraits, to Edward W. Redfield's twentieth-century impressionist landscapes, to the family photographs of contemporary artist Emmet Gowin, the Michener Art Museum's permanent collection documents the changing relationships of artists to their physical and cultural environments as well as the technical and conceptual innovations that are part of the vibrant and colorful history of Bucks County's visual arts. The Michener Art Museum's mission to serve as a center for the study of the region's artistic traditions guides the museum's collecting focus on art of the Bucks County, Pennsylvania, region. With that vision the Michener has acquired what is arguably the finest collection of Pennsylvania impressionist paintings in public hands. The strong Arts and Crafts and modern studio furniture traditions of southeastern Pennsylvania represent a significant collecting opportunity; and the museum is actively building collections in these areas as it expands its holdings of contemporary painting, sculpture, works on paper, and decorative arts. Visit the museum's website at ... www.michenerartmuseum.org

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