Craig Smyres
Craig Smyres’ studio, which is where he lives in the Riverside Artists Lofts, is dotted with bronze sculptures he has made over the years. His favorite subjects are cars, women and car/woman combinations. In one piece, “Autolust,” a woman’s slightly abstracted, three-dimensional head is joined to a two-dimensional body cut out from the side of a Studebaker. Another bronze woman, “Diana Delahaye” (named after the make of artfully swank French cars of the 1930′s and “40′s), is styled with the leaning repose that bronze women are often fond of. She cradles one of Smyres’ toy sized, solid-bronze cars from a series patterned after General Motors’ lavish designs if the ’40′s
Bronze, Smyres says, is just the right medium for his message, “an industrial material to tell an industrial story.” The story is that Smyres loves cars–always has–but he recognizes that they conflict with his environmentalist concerns. The freedom cars represent, he says, comes at a pretty high cost.
