The Papermakers

Colleen Couch and Dolph Smith explore storytelling and family in their Dixon show.

by

Families are a funny thing. They feel constant, but they’re always changing. People fight; they make up or don’t. People move. They die; they’re born. Some marry; some divorce. But they’re family, inextricably linked through blood or bond.

Family is what artists Dolph Smith and Colleen Couch are, though the link between the two is somewhat crooked now. Once married to his son, Ben Smith, owner and executive chef of the restaurant Tsunami, Couch is Smith’s former daughter-in-law, mother of three of his grandchildren. So the two are still close, so close that since 2023, Couch has been archiving and cataloguing Smith’s work, their lives interlocking once again.

In this process, Couch has seen the true span of Smith’s lengthy career, the way it transitioned from watercolors to papermaking and bookmaking to sculpture. She has seen how his wife, Jessie, inspired him, how the motifs in his works shifted and matured. Couch has seen herself inspired by him and by his work, and she saw the same urge to create burgeoning in Smith, who hasn’t stopped creating his art even at 91.

So a joint show at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, “Walk in the Light,” on view through June 29th, came about — a chance to showcase the arc of Smith’s oeuvre, new works by Smith inspired by Couch, and two new collaborations by Couch and Smith. Once more their lives would interlock.

Memphis College of Art, or the Memphis Academy of Arts for the earlier generations of this story, is where the first thread of this family web was spun. Smith went there and then taught there, eventually teaching his own daughter, Allison, who would teach Couch, who would also go on to teach at the school, too, where her son — Allison’s nephew, Smith’s grandson — would also attend. “We kept that place afloat,” Smith jokes now.

“Have I told the story about how I ended up in art school?” he asks, excited at a chance to tell a story he’s clearly told many times before, but this time to a new audience. “I was a G.I. for three years stationed in Germany and ended up in Berlin.”

His sergeant had offered two tickets to the Berlin Symphony, and Smith jumped at the offer. “We’d never done anything like that, so we dressed up and went to this huge place, and there were thousands of people. There was just this buzz. People talking and buzzing. The energy was all over the place. … The musicians had come in, and all they did was sit there and make these funny noises, plucking on the instruments and tooting on their horns.

“But this elegant man came in and he went over to this podium place,” he continues, “and he picked up a stick — I didn’t know what a baton was — he picked up a stick and turned to the people who had been tooting and plucking on the instruments. And he picked up the stick and he began to wave it, and they began to play, and I burst into, not just tears, but I was sobbing out loud. I was just crying my eyes out.”

As soon as Smith left the symphony, he says, he called his mother and woke her up. “I said, ‘Mother, find me an art school.’ And she didn’t even ask questions. She found what was then the Memphis Academy of Arts, and I got back out of the Army just in time to get down there and started two weeks later.”

“My studio talks to me. We interact with each other and in doing so, I never lack for an idea.” — Dolph Smith

At this point, Smith had never drawn or painted before and showed little interest in art as a child growing up in Ripley, Tennessee, but as luck would have it, he had the talent, as his classes would reveal. “You got to believe in faith. You got to believe in something,” he says. “It gave me a life. It was the beginning of my life.”

Smith first turned to watercolor. “It was a quick medium,” he says. “Mother Nature takes over a watercolor. And I like that concept, that I’m collaborating with Mother Nature.”

He took to painting architectural forms — barns, houses, bridges, fences, ladders. He’d drive out to abandoned shacks and places in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee where Mother Nature had taken over to paint, often with his family in tow — “field trips,” he called them.

By the Seventies, the planks that made up the walls of Smith’s houses and barns began to take on wings, his adherence to reality loosening. “He started merging birds and wings and buildings together so that the buildings could fly, and then he takes this form and turns it into his paper airplane,” says Ellen Daugherty, assistant curator at the Dixon.

Those paper airplanes, too, would become an important motif. Smith told Daugherty, “It finally came to me after a couple of summers trying to get some experience with flying gliders. I wanted to be up in the skies I had always painted. It gave me a sense that the sky was/is a real physical form. It was what was holding me up. But I felt a little fragile. Hence the paper airplane. It stands for humankind. We are fragile but we can soar!”

And so Smith began attaching tiny paper airplanes, folding and cutting them this way and that, to abstracted skies where the paint pooled and bled and swiveled as watercolor tends to do. The effect is something otherworldly and dreamlike. “Maybe you’re looking at the sky,” Daugherty says. “Maybe you’re looking at the ocean from the air.”

In 1973, Smith gifted one of these paper airplane paintings to English rock star David Bowie while he was in Memphis to play at the Ellis Auditorium on his Aladdin Sane tour. Smith invited the singer to attend an art opening at the Memphis Academy of Arts, and after Bowie showed up, the story became legend at the school, passed down from class to class. Now alum Mike McCarthy is even trying to sculpt a 10-foot-tall David Bowie statue partially in honor of the moment, hoping to establish it in a place like Overton Park.

Throughout the years, Smith has impacted many artists, obviously not just through his David Bowie connection — first as a watercolor teacher, then as a papermaking and bookmaking teacher. “He founded the paper and book programs at the art college,” Daugherty says.

Papermaking, for Dolph, was a natural progression from his painting and drawing, says his daughter, Allison Read Smith. “He’s always had a really hearty curiosity that way, and there was a certain point, where it was like, ‘I’m working on this surface. But what is this surface? How is it made? How can it be different?’ Then it just kind of went down some kind of years-long rabbit hole, decades-long rabbit hole.”

And working with paper wasn’t too dissimilar from working with watercolor, Smith says. Once again, he was partnering with Mother Nature. “She’s a boss,” he says. “You have to beat fibers so that they will create an electric attachment to each other and that bonds the paper together. The paper is not held together with adhesive or glue or anything. It’s held together by an act of nature.”

Smith learned that he could dye paper, cast it, make sculptures and books from it. The books, in turn, opened a new world — quite literally. It’s called Tennarkippi, a portmanteau of Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi, and a fictional place with characters and institutions like a library and a museum.

He created books, sculptures, paintings, and drawings of Tennarkippi. There was Jilly Barnes, a troublemaker with far-fetched schemes, and Aslipah, the hero in his stories, a small paper airplane that roamed the landscape. Its name recalls “a slip of paper.”

“It’s bringing back a lot of memories when I came up with this stuff,” Smith says, but his imagination still whirs today in his studio in Ripley, Tennessee — his studio that he also calls Tennarkippi. “My studio talks to me. We interact with each other and in doing so, I never lack for an idea.”

Like Smith, Couch finds the studio to be a space to “catch ideas.” “It’s very much a Zen, almost spiritual experience because you have to relax into the process,” she says. “You don’t have very much control over it. And so giving yourself into the process helps me on a creative level. I might get in the studio and have an idea or concept in mind, but the sort of meditative state papermaking can take me into, I’ll change course. … It’s a fun place to be, very therapeutic.”

Initially, though, Couch fancied herself a painter when she enrolled at the Memphis College of Art, but once there she found herself enjoying her sculpture classes much more. “One of the elective studio courses that I decided to take was papermaking with Allison,” she says. “There’s a lot of foundational work that you have to teach for papermaking, but she included projects that use paper sculpturally, and I just immediately fell in love with it. And I took as many years of papermaking as I could.”

She never took a class from Smith, but over the years she found him to be a mentor. At one point, she had been traveling so much from Memphis to Ripley to use his tools and machines that he eventually gave all of them to her to use in her Midtown studio. And archiving his work has made their bond closer.

“I don’t know if it’ll ever be done,” she says. “There’s just so much work, and Dolph had done a lot of the hard work for me. He kept very, very diligent notes and collections of his work in the beginning.”

Twice a week, she’d travel to Ripley to document his work. She’s found pieces hidden under the stairs, gone through hundreds of slides of his work and his collection of other artists’ work, taken photographs, and asked him questions, so many questions. “I certainly enjoyed the stories that came out of it,” she says. “I think it was probably great for Dolph to have his memory jogged a little bit and to go down memory lane, have that sense of nostalgia and memory about past life, past friends, and all those wonderful connections that he’s made throughout his life.”

“It’s a good way to look back and realize that the things we make are always honest,” Smith says. “It’s always hands take over from our hearts, and it’s all honest.”

That’s what he looks for in art, he says — honesty. “We think of art as being about skill and what have you, but really the good art is about storytelling. … It’s very evident with [Couch’s] work.”

For the joint show, Couch wanted to tell the story of Smith and his late wife, Jessie, who died in 2020. “Jessie was just such an incredible presence in his life on multiple levels,” Couch says. “In his piece, J-Bird, that’s on exhibit in the show, the story he told me was that she came into the studio to bring him some coffee or something, and she turned away. He asked her to stop and take all her clothes off and stand on the table so he could draw her. J-Bird, in particular, I mean, you can look at it and immediately identify the love and admiration he has for his muse.”

In this drawing, Jessie takes on wings, much like the barns and houses of his. She’s stately, heavenly, yet sensual. In the corner of the drawing, under his signature, Smith has written, “This is Jessie as seen by her husband Dolph Smith.”

“Dolph misses her in ways that I can’t comprehend,” Couch says, and so she created her own J-Bird — Night Flite 2: Ode to J-Bird — a cast paper sculpture of the bust of Jessie as a guardian angel. Nearby hangs Couch’s Nite Flight 1: Ode to Aslipah, a paper airplane, representing Smith. “She’s calling him back to her, and he’s drifting from the life he’s at right now and headed towards her,” she says.

“It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,” Smith says.

For “Walk in the Light,” “we just kind of agreed to collaborate on two pieces,” Couch says. “Basically, I made one component of a piece and then handed it off to him to complete, and he did the reverse for me.”

Colleen made paper from Jessie’s clothing, and Smith created a book. “The book lives forever,” he says, pointing out that it’s another way to honor his late wife.

Smith, meanwhile, crafted several tiny ladders for Colleen to use. These ladders he makes nearly every day, Allison says, keeping his mind and hands nimble. They’ve been another one of his symbols like the paper airplane, showing up in his sculptures, drawings, paintings, and books. As for these tiny ladders, he says, “I make the ladders knowing that eventually I’ll maybe give them away. And I tell people every now and then, everybody needs a little lift. I’ve even given them to strangers, a stranger that would tell me how to get somewhere, and I might have one in my pocket to say thanks for the help.”

With those ladders in hand, Couch says, “I wanted to see them floating and lifting up on their own. And there’s so much literal flight in his work — the drawings of the barns, uplifting and taking flight, or the airplanes drifting out in the sky — I feel like these ladders needed to have that chance.”

Thus, the ladders took on paper wings in a wall installation, the symbol for Smith’s simple gestures of kindness taking flight, taking on their own meanings to those he has touched in life — even Couch. “For me, those ladders definitely give me a lift but they also shake me out of less-than-positive thinking patterns,” Couch told Daugherty.

As Couch reflects on her time archiving Smith’s work, she says, “I’ve known Dolph for nearly three decades now and have been part of that family, and have always admired his work and the creative output, but it took the experience of having to archive it, to really shed new light on the depth of his work. I felt like the title ‘Walk in the Light’ was a good phrase to illuminate the eye-opening experience I had working with him.”

Indeed, Smith has reminded her that to be an artist is to be a risk-taker. “His creative drive was a bigger monster than superficial success,” Couch says, “and I think that the work on display sort of embodies the risks that he took to translate those ideas that would come to him and get out of his head into the world.”

“It’s been a great life,” adds Allison. “Who knows the things that change your life — like with the symphony? Who knows why that made him think, it was something so powerful and creative that he had to be in that world?”

By that extension, without that symphony, without the Memphis College of Art, without the Smith family, who knows where Colleen Couch would be, too? The stories that could be spun.