Vernon Smith Returns to Provincetown
ART HISTORY
Bakker Gallery shows the late artist’s batiks, metalwork, and woodwork
BY ANDRE VAN DER WENDE SEP 15, 2021
SOURCE: PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT
“It’s the sensibility that people relate to — the design. It’s very clever,” says Jim Bakker, unfolding some of Vernon Smith’s famed batiks — fabrics dyed with a wax-resist method —from the 1930s. They depict clipper ships in full sail, flora and fauna, and billowing clouds in soft tones.
Bakker is showing the batiks, including a large three-panel batik screen; a lone carving of a sandpiper with an exaggeratedly long beak; and some of Smith’s metalwork at his Provincetown gallery, with an opening on Friday, Sept. 17.
The show, however, is just the tip of Smith’s creative iceberg. Born in 1894 in Cortland, N.Y., Smith attended the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons School of Design) in 1913 and 1914, where the industrial arts — metalwork, sculpture, textiles — were cornerstones of his education.
One of Smith’s famed batiks. (Photo courtesy Bakker Gallery)
