FORBES
A California Artist Finds Peace In Isolation
FORBES
August 2020
Written by Brienne Walsh
A California Artist Finds Peace In Isolation
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.
“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.
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.”
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DWELL
A Creative Couple’s Redwood-Clad Home Draws In Panoramic Bay Area Views
DWELL
July 2020
Written by Brian Libby | Photographed by Benard Andre
A Creative Couple’s Redwood-Clad Home Draws In Panoramic Bay Area Views
Elizabeth Paige Smith and Christopher Stringer’s hilltop retreat is a lucent gem on an impressive perch.
Although the Seeds residence is a delicate fusion of glass and reclaimed redwood—a place where every detail has been thoughtfully considered—owners Elizabeth Paige Smith and Christopher Stringer would be the first to tell you that the story starts with the picturesque site.
At this crest of a forested hill near Woodside, California, beyond the sprawling Silicon Valley megalopolis, it’s possible to see both the Pacific Ocean to the west and San Francisco Bay to the north. Yet the view somehow becomes even more beautiful as visibility decreases.
"When the fog comes up from the ocean, you really experience some incredible drama," says Elizabeth, a visual artist specializing in sculpture, tapestries, and film. "They’re some of the most killer sunsets I’ve experienced." Long before the project was completed, the couple got married at the site in 2013, she adds, "because it’s so special there."
A late addition to the design is the expanded entry, which forms a glass corner to provide a first glimpse into the house while extending a canopy and trellis outward. "That, I think, was a pivotal movement," says Gwise. "It took their concept of the glass box and brought it around to the front to give the house a sense of symmetry.”
Juxtaposed against the glass is the home’s other material signature: the use of reclaimed and naturally-stained redwood, which the project’s builder, Louis Ptak, sourced from an airplane hangar being deconstructed at nearby Moffet Field.
"When we got the first batch, we knew it wasn’t meant to be just an exterior experience," Elizabeth recalls. "We were like, ‘It has to wrap and come inside. The redwood really played a major role in bringing the outdoors in.”
If Elizabeth’s artful eye helped shape the house and site’s renovation, so too did her husband, who spent over two decades as a designer for Apple. That’s how Christopher met first met James Gwise, who spent most of the 2000s at architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, designer of many Apple stores. "Chris looks for the simplicity in complicated things," Elizabeth says. "We also connect over the emotional impact of bringing materials together."
Take how the redwood panels line up inside. Even as a door closes, or a Murphy bed in one studio folds into the wall, the pattern remains uninterrupted, as if the bed or door simply disappear. Or consider how the wood walls float above the concrete floors in the new addition. "Everything had to be on module, on rhythm," Gwise says. "Not much was left to chance in this house.”
There are many artful details inside, such as a bathroom sink carved into a massive boulder, for which added structural support had to be built underneath the floor, or a white marble step used as the final transition from the wood stairway to the concrete floor. Which is to say nothing of the bold marble kitchen countertops.
And indeed, the Seeds residence has proven to be inspiring. Elizabeth has created several outdoor sculptures there, using an outdoor area beside the house as a kind of testing ground.
"When making art, I like to go by feel and slowly find my way forward," she says, noting that the Seeds house turned out the same way: a series of continuing conversations that led to a simple concept, exquisitely executed. "It’s a really tight ship," Elizabeth adds. "The spaces and how they flow together really harmonize."
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