There are artists dedicated to their craft; then there is Melissa Cowper-Smith.
The Morrilton woman’s latest interest is pigment prints — and she grows her own cotton to make the paper.
She’s a multimedia artist who uses projected video animation, digital printing, collage and painting.
“I am unusual in that I move between mediums a lot. I have one I’m usually in love with, but it shifts. Right now, I’m really interested in paper,” she said. “I’m super interested in cotton.”
The Canadian has lived in Arkansas since 2011 and loves her rural life; it’s why she came to
Arkansas. She grows 30 to 40 brown Nankeen cotton plants on her eco farm, Wildland Gardens. She also uses the stalks of some of the flowers she grows to make paper. “Daylilies make great paper — not the actual flowers, just the leaves,” she said.
The recipe to make paper includes boiling the grass for hours outside in big pots, which she said reminds her of a witch standing over a cauldron. The mixture is strained and blended. “It becomes like a really gross garden smoothie,” she said, laughing.
The rest of the long process is so time-consuming that even she says, “it’s silly.”
But it’s so satisfying.
“When I first grew [cotton], I was just growing it for interest. … ‘Oh, wow, you can grow it here,’” she said. “At first, I spun and wove it. I didn’t have a way to connect it to my art; I could not figure it out for the life of me.”
Cowper-Smith, an adjunct art teacher at the University of Central Arkansas and formerly at Hendrix College, both in Conway, got help from friend Melissa Gill, chairwoman of the Hendrix Art Department, who also teaches printmaking.
Cowper-Smith started experimenting with making paper.
“I think it’s important because we’re interested in localism now. … How do we connect to a place? It’s incredibly local to make your own paper,” Cowper-Smith said.
“So often now, we feel alienated from our things. We order on Amazon; things are made in China,” she said. “A lot of people are seeking a deeper connection to the materials in their lives and the products in their lives.”
In 2016, she was awarded a scholarship to Penland School of Craft in North Carolina. She described the school as “one of the meccas for creative people; it’s fantastic.”
She took a course in typography of paper, and her teacher’s specialty was making paper out of found plants.
Cowper-Smith’s experience at Penland is one of many adventures in her life.
Born in Canada, she went to the University of Victoria in British Columbia and moved to New York City for graduate school at Hunter College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts degree. That’s where she met a philosophy student from New Jersey, James Dow, her husband. They moved to Arkansas to raise their son, Afton, 7.
Cowper-Smith’s parents were psychologists. Her mother taught art before becoming a child psychologist and is a member of The Dahlia Society, where she grows and judges the flowers.
Cowper-Smith said that although she won awards for art in high school, she first took science and math courses in college, planning to become a biologist.
“I just didn’t realize art could be a serious thing to study,” she said. “I thought science was more worthwhile, so I didn’t study art. It seemed like a hobby.”
However, she met serious artists at the University of Victoria, and she switched her major after a year.
“I belong with artists; I always have,” she said. “I like the way they think.”
Cowper-Smith taught high school and college art while she lived in New York City.
But living in New York City was a challenge for her.
“It was very, very hard for me because I’m a plant lover who is quiet and likes being in the garden,” she said. “My studio was next to the Port Authority, three blocks from Times Square. Every day I was walking, there were crowds of people, no trees. The first couple of years were really physically, emotionally hard for me.”
However, she worked nature into her life. She owned horses and taught riding lessons in Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
“You find the way you want to live, no matter where you are,” she said.
Still, she wanted to raise her son where he had room to roam and play.
Cowper-Smith had never been to Arkansas when they moved here.
She knew Arkansas had affordable land.
“I knew I could grow plants here; I knew I could have horses here,’ she said. “I didn’t know much about the South or the culture, except for stereotypes — I was from Canada. I wasn’t scared. I knew there were good people everywhere.”
She and her husband found acreage in Morrilton.
“I just love our house. We met our neighbors before we bought the house, and we just love our neighbors,” Cowper-
Smith said. “I actually felt like I was returning to a culture I was familiar with. In Canada, my grandpa was a cattle rancher; I was raised with horses, land ….
“In Arkansas, I was like, ‘Yeah, these are my people.’”
She got busy with life. She raised her son, grew her garden, was an adjunct instructor at Hendrix, as well as UCA, and created art.
“Arkansas has been great for showing art,” she said.
“I guess the first exciting thing was a show I had at the Batesville Arts Council,”
Cowper-Smith said. It was a solo show, the Fleeting Gardens series.
“I had gone and met a lot of small organic farmers in Arkansas and went to their houses and photographed organic flowers and vegetable gardens in Arkansas,” she said. “It was a really great opportunity to meet a lot of great people. The community up there was so supportive of art.”
However, she missed the feeling of camaraderie with women artists. In New York City, after graduate school, she started an all-female critique group called tART.
“It came out of a feeling that being a female artist was still harder than being a male artist,” she said. “It started as a support and building up each other. When I moved to Arkansas, I missed that.”
In 2013, Cowper-Smith founded an all-female artists group in Arkansas called the Show & Tell Art Collective, now called Culture Shock. Although Cowper-Smith didn’t experience a huge culture shock in Arkansas, most of the nine or 10 women in the group are transplants to Arkansas, thus the name, she said.
The women all have master’s degrees in art and are “currently making a body of art,” she said. They hold critiques and exhibit their work.
Cowper-Smith’s work was selected for the 31st annual Small Works on Paper touring exhibition at the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center in Little Rock, where it is on display through Saturday. The free exhibit is sponsored by the Arkansas Arts Council.
Her piece selected is a pigment print titled Convention Fire on her handmade paper.
“It’s a mix of lilies and cotton,” she said. “I made that paper while I was at Penland.
“This work depicts a burnt-out version of the derelict convention center at Meadow Creek in Fox. It was an important meeting place for people concerned with the environment and global climate change in the 1980s-1990s.”
The print is part of her most recent series, Traces Remain, which will be exhibited in March at Rockford University in Illinois.
Cowper-Smith was selected for the 57th Annual Delta Exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock in 2015, and she’d like to win the grand prize someday. She’ll also exhibit at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock gallery in the fall and plans to exhibit at the Batesville Arts Council again in 2019.
Cowper-Smith said her work is ever-changing.
“I’ve always loved drawing,” she said.
But pigment paper is getting her attention now. She creates it by taking digital photographs, which she uses to make paintings, “not directly from them, but parts of them, mixed up,” she said.
She scans the paintings and uses Photoshop software to blend them together,
something she has done for “years and years.” She also makes videos of the work using the “layers” of the Photoshop program, she said.
“I make animations, a form of digital stop-motion animation, and prints,” she said. “When I have a show, I will have a projection of the video, and usually it’s the same scene.”
Cowper-Smith enjoys depicting scenes of nature through her pigment prints.
Not long after her family moved to Arkansas, a deadly tornado tore through Vilonia and Mayflower.
“That was new to me,” she said. “I started thinking about natural disasters. I started thinking a lot about how you can love the beauty of the landscape but also have this fear of it, and how it can almost betray you. It can take your life and destroy your stuff.”
She said Arkansas has been a good place to create art; it’s a constant inspiration.
“I have a lot of people who inspire me, and mostly right now, it’s the people from my art group,” she said.
One of those is Holly Laws, a sculptor and UCA associate professor of art.
“I just love Holly Laws. … She’s amazing; she worked for a puppet troupe and has amazing hand skills,” Cowper-Smith said.
The admiration is mutual.
“I’m a big fan of Melissa’s work,” Laws said. “I’m especially drawn to her digital prints on handmade paper. The work has strong conceptual underpinnings and is a visual feast. There is such a painterly feel to her work. Her use of color and visual texture in her compositions is masterful. I also love that the work she is currently producing in Arkansas has such a strong connection to place and the people who live here. This is not work that Melissa could have made anywhere else.”
Louise Halsey of Ozark is another Culture Shock member whom Cowper-Smith admires.
“She’s a weaver. She’s really fantastic because she’s always lived by her own rules. She grows her own food,” Cowper-Smith said. “I love people who have like connections to objects and materials and the land.”
“I’m researching people who grow medicinal herbs right now; they’re my current curiosity. I don’t know how it’s going to
play out.”
But you can bet however it does, Cowper-Smith will be deeply dedicated to the work.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.