Though not as disturbing, Smith’s other art books explore absence, too. House of Giller is his depiction of inside the home of his longtime friend and fellow East Dallas artist Susan Giller, who since passed away, during the times when he would house sit for her.
“Basically, it was never intentional to document her house, but what the heck are you going to do?” Smith says, mentioning that her neurotic cat hated everyone but Giller. “When she died (in 2024), I realized that I had all these drawings of her place, and then after we had the estate sale, and I was back at her little bungalow, it was like she just disappeared. Even when her house still had the things in it, because she wasn’t there, they were losing their sparkle.”
Nine Days With LiHua is made up of works he created from inside his friends’ New York apartment while he was looking after their cat, LiHua.
Despite invoking them both by name in the titles, Smith doesn’t draw Giller nor LiHua. Giller’s face is included via a self-portrait she made of herself, and LiHua’s face, obscured by a curtain, is shown in a photo. In LiHua’s case, the point is to show her home, which is everything to a cat, and make the viewer see the world through her eyes.
“The cat is present in her absence,” Smith says. “This is where she sleeps in front of the radiator. This is where she scratches her little paws. So she’s present, but like a ghost, I never saw her. I’ve cat sat for her four times, and she’s like a ghost. You only hear her as a bump in the night or as something out of the corner of your eye as she darts from one room to the other.”