Page:Woman in Art.djvu/212

WOMAN IN ART not paintable," he would say, and she, in spite of her awe of him, would answer mischievously, "That is just what I think about snow."

Mr. Harrison taught her a great deal and under his influence she began to train herself to go out and look at things and paint them from memory.

There is an orientalism in her composition and handling of light and shade that, applied to the poetic subjects of her southern environment, produced a fascinating art. The white egret in its boudoir of sheltering palms overhanging the river is a thing of beauty, of nature, of solitude, and exquisite art. So, too, is the broad sweep of marshland softened by the misty atmosphere of the dawning, through which the white herons take to wing from beds amid the reeds. No other method could bring out the poetry of nature's every-dayness and give to art the hallmark of the southland.

Alice Smith has a remarkable knowledge of Japanese line and color, the immediate impulse for which was the study of Japanese woodcuts with her kinsman, Motte Alston Read, and a later indebtedness to Helen Hyde, who enlarged her vision of that phase of art during her stay in Charleston.

The backgrounds for her dreams in color are phenomenal in their relation to the main object, as exemplified in the opening bud of the Magnolia Grandiflora, in juxtaposition to the soft lunette of the rising sun, while the tint from its nest of richest green leafage mingles with the waving gray of Spanish moss. Another example, which hardly has need of a name, was one of her earliest prints, "The Moonflower and the Hawk-moth," purchased by a Japanese collector in New York and taken to his native Japan. In that woodblock print the moonflower has opened its pure white, funnel-shaped beauty against the silver of the full moon, and the velvety moth is within touch of the golden stamens. Two or three leaves of night-shaded green give the artistic contrast to the picture.

Alice Smith has a wide reputation for the three phases of her art, through the Southern States Art League and the Carolina Art Association, which is rapidly spreading and interesting the north. She is in love with her native land and with all that therein is, and it is full of beauty and interest. A little cabin with a door and one window, smoke dreamily escaping from a hole in the gable, a few tall, long-leafed pines for its background, and an unkempt space of weedy foreground makes a picture that lingers with one. You realize it is miles from anywhere, that peace and quiet broods the place like a blessing. You can almost hear bird notes from bush and tree. Then there is the human side of the picture, the psychological, that sets one to thinking, just because of that little curl of smoke. 170