FORBES

August 2020

Written by Brienne Walsh

A California Artist Finds Peace In Isolation

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A few weeks ago, I had a lovely Zoom call with the artist Elizabeth Paige Smith, who goes by Betsy. Towards the end, she told me that earlier that day, she had stuck her head in a water tower on her six-acre property in Woodside, California, and listened to the sound of her own breath as a form of sound art. As a mother of two young children currently living in a constant state of anxiety, I wished that I could achieve that same zen in my own mosquito-filled backyard in Savannah, Georgia.

For the past ten years, Smith says, she has lived in isolation in a Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation house in Woodside, a wealthy community just outside of Palo Alto. The experience prepared her for the isolation many people have experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I didn’t have any distractions,” she told me. “I was really one with the coyotes, with the hawks. I was in unison with the frogs.”

Before moving to her current home, Smith was a successful furniture designer and curator with an atelier on Abbott Kinney Boulevard. Celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kanye West, Kirstin Dunst and Patricia Arquette collected her work. The life she led in Venice, while glamorous, distracted her from accessing the sense of equilibrium with nature and her own creativity she had first discovered while a child in the Cayman Islands.

She found it again by chance on the estate where she still lives in the hills above Silicon Valley, which belonged to the man who would eventually become her husband. “I came and experienced such an incredible soul connection, both with him, and with the land itself,” she said. She decided to leave her life in Venice, and merge with her soul mate.

In her decade of isolation, Smith produced a number of bodies of work, among them “Naked and Fucking Free,” a series of anthropomorphic stone sculptures, and “A Very Long Day,” a series of tapestries in burnt sienna and orange that capture, she says, the raw and untamed spirit in every woman.

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“Naked and Fucking Free” consists of eight stone sculptures that look like women basking, spread-eagled, or crouched, in the sun. They were inspired by a trip Smith took in 2013 to a stone quarry, where she found stones that looked like the legs of a female figure. Smith, who describes herself as “material curious,” said that she spent the next decade combing quarries in the Pacific Northwest for the perfect stones to complete each of the eight bodies.

“I recognize the material of the stones as being very masculine,” she told me. “I just sort of want to break free and challenge the preconceived ideas of feminine and masculine within the body.”

There is a freedom and wildness to the sculptures. They are also extremely redolent of the work of 20th century sculptors including Josef Pillhofer and Max Bill. It is easy to see Kanye West getting a glimpse of the series, and ordering an army of the spread-eagled women for his ranch in Cody, Wyoming. It’s also easy to see how the series could be inspired by Smith herself, removed enough from human contact that she can truly be in communion with her own personal Garden of Eden.

The woven strands of the tapestries in “A Very Long Day” read like a love story in a song by Joni Mitchell, or a story Joan Didion. A nude woman with very long orange hair appears in tableaus that are alternated with phrases like “feel the warmth,” or “I waited for you all day.” They look like something that someone who collects crystals would very much enjoy having in their sunny mid-century modern home. Smith says she hoped to capture the “guttural” energy all women know they possess, but don’t necessarily know how to channel.

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Smith had recently decided to re-emerge from her estate in Woodside, and re-immerse herself in the Venice art scene, when the coronavirus pandemic struck. For now, she’s back in her aerie.

In terms of advice she would give to people experiencing isolation for the first time, she says: “I think the best thing is to find a connection to what really makes you happy. Create boundaries for technology and give yourself space to disengage.”