CLARK ASHTON SMITH DRAWING

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Thank you for looking at my auction. This is an original watercolor drawing of a woman's head by Clark Ashton Smith. Smith was born on January 13th, 1893, in Long Valley, California. In 1904 he and his father built a simple four-room cabin on Boulder Ridge outside of Auburn. Ill health as a child prevented him from attending all but five years at the local schoolhouse, and although admitted to Placer County High School set out upon a campaign of self-education that included reading at least one unabridged dictionary, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and the complete contents of the local Carnegie Library. He began to write at an early age, fairy tales and imitations of the Arabian Nights and of Kipling’s stories, and sold several short stories to magazines such as the Overland Monthly and the Black Cat at the age of 17. It was the discovery of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, closely followed by a reading of George Sterling’s “A Wine of Wizardry,” that set Smith upon the course of his life. A local schoolteacher introduced Smith to Sterling, forming a friendship that would last until Sterling;s suicide in 1926. Smith’s first book, The Star-Treader and Other Poems , was an international sensation when published in 1912. He was hailed by the San Francisco press as a new Keats and as the boy-poet of the Sierras, and if the eastern press was more diffident it nonetheless recognized his merits. Ambrose Bierce read some of Smith’s poems in manuscript and praised them highly, and Edwin Markham would later say that Smith’s poem “Nero” contained some of the most beautiful lines in English poetry. The Book Club of California published Odes and Sonnets in 1918 in a limited edition. Smith’s next two books, Ebony and Crystal (1922) and Sandalwood (1925) were published by the Auburn Journal. The necessity to care for his aging parents led Smith to take up the writing of imaginative short stories for pulp magazines such as Wonder Stories and Weird Tales in the late 1920s. During the space of five years he turned out approximately one hundred polished and imaginative tales of “inconceivable fear and unimaginable love” set in such secondary worlds as Zothique, last continent of earth under a dying red sun, and the medieval province of Averoigne, beset by enchantresses and lamiae. These were later collected in hardcover byArkham House and have been translated into several languages. Among those who have praised his stories are H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Michael Chabon, Clive Barker, and many others.The deaths of his parents, combined with a growing disgust at the low standards of pulp editors and readers, led to his resumption of poetry writing. Smith married late in life, to Carol Dorman, and moved to Pacific Grove in 1954. He died of a stroke in 1961, having seen his fourth collection of short stories, The Abominations of Yondo , achieve print. Smith began drawing sometime in 1915. Although largely self-taught, he possessed a remarkably visual imagination that found expression in a number of graphic media. He wrote of his artwork to his mentor, the prominent San Francisco poet and personality George Sterling: "Of course, I lack technical training, in the academic sense. But I don’t care much more for the literalness of academic painting than I do for the geometrical abstractions of some of the modernists. What I am after is imaginative (some would say emotional) expression through organized design and colour with novel decorative values. Realism is not aimed at, and I reserve the right to paint in perfectly flat colours, if I wish. The decorative screens and panels of R. W. Chanler, which show an Oriental influence, are more to my taste than the work of most American painters. As to getting instructions, I doubt if my ideals would be understood or sympathized with, by the average art teacher. I’ll have to work it out in my own way. Certainly Herkomer, who is, or was, a portrait-painter, would be of little help in teaching me how to paint landscape... read more

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