COVID-inspired project brings portraits to Village Market to evoke ‘A Better Place’

November 20, 2020  |  By Shanti Boyle  |  Community News Service 

Torrey Carroll Smith's third group of oil paintings of community members are on view at the Waterbury Village Market for another couple of weeks. See all of the portraits on her website: torreycarrollsmith.com/covid. Photos by Lisa Scagliotti.

Georgia is a familiar face at the Village Market. Smith created portraits of her both masked and unmasked for the project.

As quarantine transitioned from spring into summer, Duxbury artist Torrey Smith felt increasingly separated from her fellow community members. She had brought home only a few materials from her studio in Waterbury, including some small squares of gessoed panel, oil paintings, and acrylics. Using those materials, she decided to create art from isolation. 

For the past couple of months, a quiet, humble exhibition of community members’ portraits have hung on the wall just inside the entrance of the downtown Village Market of Waterbury, courtesy of Smith. It’s an unassuming, surprising place to see original art, and if you take a look around the store, you might even see some of those same faces among those working and shopping in the bustling local grocery store. 

“I started thinking more about the people I was seeing and how my feelings of community and who was essential were shifting. I thought how I could combine that with the challenge of portraying strangers in a way that captures something of them. So that felt sort of beautiful and special at the end,” Smith said.  

Smith said she would come across people in her everyday life – from neighbors to the clerks at the store – and she asked to take snapshots of them. She was surprised that no one refused. From the photos she would create a painted portrait, each one taking six to eight hours to complete, she explained.   

“I reached out to people, some of whom I’d never exchanged more than one sentence with before. It forced me to be a little more brave and outgoing than I normally am, and it also gave us something to talk about; now we have this shared experience,” she said. 

While painting the portraits, Smith noticed that her connection to the people strengthened. 

“When you stare at somebody for many hours, they become really beautiful. It's a real pleasure to have had the experience to look at these people and have them be so beautiful in my eyes. It's a gift that I get out of the process,” she said.

The pressure that comes with painting someone’s likeness is immense, as it forces both subject and artist to be vulnerable with each other. Smith certainly felt this pressure, she said. 

“There’s a fear that, ‘What if I portrayed them in a way that they felt diminished them?’ But I didn’t get the sense that anybody felt that way,” she said. 

She felt honored that one of the subjects, Rodney Companion – who’s often very busy running his trash-hauling service and running the downtown recycling and redemption center – allowed her to paint his portrait and that of his ever-present canine partner Simon. She noted that another individual she painted, Lester, told her that he wanted to frame his print. 

Lester can be found at the register and now behind the Plexiglas at Crossroads Deli.

Smith captures Rodney Companion and his faithful canine Simon in these two oil portraits.

Elementary school teacher and high school basketball coach Tom Young, yet another subject of Smith’s works, said he was also pleased with the project. “It’s great to see a different way of looking at yourself. And we’re all wearing masks now, so it was cool to see other people’s faces. It’s nice that [Smith] shares her talents with the town and entertains us at the same time,” Young said. 

Smith painted Young along with his wife Angela and daughters Julianne and Abby.

Smith’s decision to showcase her work in the Village Market was intentional. 

“We have this tendency to think of art as something for other people. But I like to think that art is for everybody, and so by putting it in a grocery store, you’re being clear that, ‘I want everybody to see this, not just some people,’” she said. 

Her carefully cultivated sense of community within the work as a whole is evidenced by the title of the exhibition: “A Better Place.”

“All these people around me – including those I painted, but many, many more – are all making a choice to try and make this [pandemic] as good as possible. Not just for us, but the people around us. It’s not so much that Vermont is a better place, it’s that we, all around us, are trying to make this world a better place,” she said. 

Smith’s third and final collection of portraits is hanging in the market now just inside the entrance near the customer service desk. She says it will be there until early December. Posting on Front Porch Forum recently, she reminded readers to stop and notice the faces before she takes them down. “How many of the faces will you recognize? After you run your items through the cashier, take a moment to sneak a peek at the very front of the store on your way out the door.”

All of the portraits are also online on her website.

Community News Service is a collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Reporting & Documentary Storytelling program.