ARTIST STATEMENT

“When I got the instinct, I was a kid in Louisiana about nine years old,” says self-taught artist Isaac Smith. I would follow my daddy around in the woods hunting, and when he’d shoot something, I’d pick it up and turn it over and see how it was made. Daddy used to say, ‘You’re gonna catch something from those animals, boy.’ But I just had to look at ‘em. I knew that I could make that animal.

More than 40 years later, Isaac Smith is still spending time looking for animals. He sees monkeys, rattlesnakes, crocodiles, and saber-toothed tigers in the branches of the walnut tree in his backyard, in a hackberry by the roadside, in old stumps that others might only look to for firewood. When Isaac was a boy growing up in Louisiana, he didn’t know why he was so fascinated by animals, but now he does. His “instinct,” as he calls it, is to sculpt and paint raw wood into remarkable forms of animal life with as much energy and charm as their entertaining creator.

From Isaac’s Ark: The Art and Times of Isaac Smith, By Ronald J. Gard