This Artist Ain’t Starving — But He’s Hungry

Hank Miles Smith finds inspiration in food — and the cooks and kitchens behind it.

by

Culture

Editor’s Note: As an adjunct professor at Rhodes College, Brooks Lamb teaches a course on farming and society, while working full-time in the fields of conservation and agriculture. He is the author of Love for the Land: Lessons from the Farmers Who Persist in Place and Overton Park: A People’s History.

My conversation with Hank Miles Smith wasn’t planned. A few months ago, I was prepping for a podcast reporting trip to rural Colorado. I had a new microphone and needed to test it before heading to the field. So, on a whim, I called my friend Hank and invited him over for an impromptu interview.

Hank is a Memphis-based artist. When asked, he’ll describe himself as “emerging,” but that isn’t exactly right. He has hosted several solo shows around town, and his paintings and collages hang in homes across the city and around the South. He is a member of the Ugly Art Co., a popular gallery and artist collective in the Edge District, and he’s a mentor to up-and-comers. Hank’s work has also raised money and awareness for local organizations like Wolf River Conservancy. Without a doubt, the Appalachian-born painter has emerged, and he’s leaving a mark.

Our conversation started with a Sky Dog and no direction. When the talk turned to home-cooked meals, fishing, and blackberry jam, we found a groove and stuck with it. Hank shared how food and the cultural practices that surround it have shaped his life and art.

Brooks Lamb: Food is a big part of your life. You love to cook, you like to hunt and fish, and you enjoy foraging. How have food and foodways influenced your art?

Hank Miles Smith: Food is one of the ways I learned to understand where I come from and where my family comes from. A lot of my work looks at the past as a living thing without using the crutch of nostalgia. Nostalgia is kind of a self-serving fabrication of the past, a piecemeal selection of what’s desirable. That’s not what I paint.

My earliest memories with my grandma and my granddad are around food and the almost religious way they went about making it. Their meals were always the core of any family get-together. So was the preparation. When I was a kid, my mom took me and my siblings out to pick blackberries, or my grandma had us shuck corn or help harvest whatever was in the garden.

This sounds corny, but for me, food is a way to interact with my ancestry and history. It’s my mom using the same flour brand that my great grandma used, or my granddad taking me mushroom picking in a southwestern Virginia apple orchard that only he and a handful of other people even know about because it’s hidden on the side of a mountain. It's just a direct way to pay respect to the people that came before you while also providing for the present and future. That theme is wound into a lot of my art.

BL: Right. You tell your story through your artwork, and it’s very much your story — but, at least for your food-focused paintings, you share it in a way that resonates with others, in part because eating is an integral act in everyone's life.

HS: When I’m painting some of those more mundane things that are special to me — and sometimes I think they're only special to me — it’s cool to see the reaction it prompts in others. I painted a deer shank, seen after gutting the deer and prepping it. The viewer has to wrestle with emotions stirred by something that a lot of people are so removed from, which is butchering. But just by the fact that they’re looking at it and not avoiding it, you can almost feel a respect for that tradition and that language of food.

I can paint a bloody deer shank and it may seem dark, but I’m coming from a perspective of happiness and sustenance and fellowship. Hopefully you can see that translated into the art, and people can understand the point of it without me having to tell them it’s beautiful. Then they can backtrack from the joy, the colors, and the design of the painting to get to the subject in a way that they really see it.

BL: Tell me about some of your other paintings with food themes. Where did you find the vision for these works? Why did you decide to paint them?

HS: A lot of them come from specific memories. For example, there’s the painting with the tobacco pouch and the mountains. It’s got a fish being gutted and cicadas, and it’s trying to grasp the feeling and the taste and the smell of a specific moment with my granddad. It uses iconography, all to get to gratitude for his influence on me. I’m trying to articulate that tradition and make it beautiful as opposed to pretty.

BL: That’s a great line. “Make it beautiful as opposed to pretty.”

HS: It feels like a cliché. I say this all the time, but I’m not trying to be a landscape painter or a food painter or a rural painter. Instead, I’m trying to do portraiture of moments and people I care about by using the landscape and objects — and, as we’ve talked about here, food. I’m not trying to make something feel wistful. I’m showing the weight of it, or trying to.

Because in farming and foraging and hunting and fishing — there’s an aspect of grime and heaviness to all these things. We have the tendency to take away the rougher edges, but those are what make the activities real. As we move further away from our food sources, we forget the value of these acts of sustenance. We become merely consumers instead of stewards. We keep the pretty parts and forget about the hard parts. But when you get closer to food, how it’s grown and acquired and made, you take that responsibility back.

BL: Let’s go back to something you mentioned earlier. Your paintings highlight people you care about — but few of your paintings have any people in them. That said, in the big blackberry-picking painting you made last year, you do have a person in the background. Why is she there?

HS: That was kind of impulsive. I was spending a lot of time thinking about all the work that the women in my family have done just to keep everybody alive. So that painting is dedicated to them and their acts of self-sacrifice to support the family — but also to carry on our Appalachian traditions. I put the woman in this painting because I’m painting it from a perspective of someone outside of our tradition and culture looking in. In this case, people need to see her.

BL:Just to pause on what you said about sacrifice. … Blackberry picking can be difficult. It’s not usually carefree. There are thorns and briars and snakes, and they can all tear you up. You eventually arrive at something tasty, but to get there, you’ve got to either have the skills to avoid adversity or just be willing to endure it.

HS: Yeah, as a food group, homemade jams and jellies made from blackberries and other things are interesting. They’re not nutritious at all. I guess you kind of get a jolt from the sugar, and that's why people put these things on their biscuits in the morning. It kind of captures that taste of peak summer and ripeness so that, once its canned and preserved, you can have it in the middle of the winter.

It’s a ton of work for something that's not “healthy,” but it’s a good demonstration of happiness and joy. My grandma and mom, they make jam and then give it away to people they know every year. It’s a subtle celebration of indulgence, I guess, that they can then give to other people.

BL: Your mom and grandma put in all that work and time, and the jams and jellies eventually go on to be enjoyed by someone else.

HS: Yeah, it’s a gift, which is kind of cool. There’s also another reason I decided to do that blackberry-picking painting. A few years back, my mom was doing what she has always done, just going to the side of some random rural road and picking blackberries. Some lady who was new to the area drove up and just started yelling at my mom. She was like, “You can’t pick these blackberries. These are my blackberries.”

And they were on the side of the road in a public right-of-way. She told my mom that she likes to watch them ripen and fall, which I thought was such a fantastic difference of thought between two people. She liked to see the beautiful colors, and she liked to watch them rot on the ground. I thought that was wild.

BL: Beyond your art, how has food shaped your identity and who you are?

HS: I’ve always been obsessed with food. It has been an easy way — when I’m missing home — to interact with my family and where I’m from.

BL: Do you have a go-to meal you like to make when you're missing home?

HS: I make a lot of chicken and dumplings, homemade biscuits, ham beans. But even when I was living far away from home, my mom would send jams and canned goods, pickles, and stuff like that through the mail.

BL: I remember you getting those care packages when we were in college.

HS: Yeah. Food has been a way to communicate with them, living so far away. It’s like a 700-mile drive to get home from here. And then it’s also a way for me to share with others. If I want to connect with somebody, I’ll usually try to make them a meal at least once. Sometimes I botch it. I get nervous.

BL: I doubt anyone can tell — you’re a great cook. Just a couple more questions. In your view, what do we get wrong about food as a culture?

HS: A lot of new chefs are making food more community-oriented nowadays, which is good. We mess up when we treat food as just something to consume. That makes us distant from what we eat and who we are. There are a lot of other things that we get wrong, but I think that’s one of the biggest. It’s not understanding food and its creation as an act of community. It’s more than just eating as a means to an end. Done right, it can almost serve as an act of prayer.

BL: How can art address what you just described, those problems of distance and lack of reverence?

HS: Art is a form of communication that doesn’t require a discussion. I can articulate my ideas, and they may not be completely grasped in the moment, but I can inform others’ thoughts. That way, people can create their own understanding. Hopefully they come to reverence on their own.

Hank Miles Smith has a new solo show, “Deep Brakes,” opening September 19th at Ugly Art Co. To learn more, visit HankMilesSmith.com or follow him on Instagram @hmiles_smith