Stuart Smith
Nothing matters about a friend who has died except his essence. Not what he did or accomplished but what he was - the thing which changed the atmosphere of a house when he lived in it or a room when he entered it; which is expressed in a face and a bearing; is connected with his natural gifts but is above and beyond them and which, if he is an artist, becomes increasingly visible in his work.
Edwin Smith had a greater range of capacities than anyone I have ever met and an extraordinary and rare general capacity - a kind of pass for a royal enclosure of skill where others are allowed in eventually only after laboriously qualifying, but which he was born with. As a result, while artistic success was no easier for him than any other practitioner in the arts, he never did anything badly. Everything was done intelligently, simply, effortlessly, or so it seemed to the observer.
Most people who knew or worked with Edwin knew this. Everyone who worked with him knew him and he them; he was the easiest person to know and gave his friendship with the utmost spontaneity. I imagine that almost everyone must also have sensed what to me was Edwin - a shining innocence. The gentleness, the humour, the sensitiveness, the exasperation, the cheerful pessimism, his inability to trifle with artistic truth - all these were somehow secondary to innocence. Although he would have been one of the first to defend Eve's taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (and I can easily hear him making a case for the serpent) really Edwin did not know any evil. This profound innocence is what he brought into a room. Much of it illuminates and distinguishes his work.
From the catalogue produced
to accompany the exhibition
'Aspects of the Art of Edwin Smith' at The
Minories,
Colchester in 1974.
