When they aren’t on buying trips, working with customers or doing all the other tasks it takes to run their High Point-based luxury home furnishings brand South + English, Palmer Linwood Smith and David Ebbetts decamp to their second home on Smith Mountain Lake. And there, they paint.
Art is a passion for both men and, in recent years, they’ve begun sharing more of their work through South + English, now selling pieces directly on the company’s website, promoting commissions and launching the Art Tank brand, which blends Smith and Ebbetts’ paintings with South + English case goods as they embellish cabinet fronts, tabletops and drawer faces, turning the furniture into functional works of art. During the fall High Point Market, South + English opened a separate showroom in 313 Space to showcase their art and their Art Tank pieces.
And starting in January, interior designers and others can see the artwork, as well as South + English furniture year-round when Smith and Ebbetts expand the hours of their main showroom at 210 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in High Point beyond the biannual High Point Market.
Smith and Ebbetts, longtime partners and creative collaborators, have built their business on the strength of their differences. As they describe themselves, Smith is the “irrepressible live-large Southerner” and Ebbetts is “a dialed-back, opinionated Brit.”
Naturally, their differences extend to their artwork.
Their creative space is nestled along the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia. “We have a three-car garage and half of it is our studio,” Smith says. “I have my tubes of paint drying out, there’s paint everywhere and I’m listening to dance or electronic music. David has baskets on shelves with his paints and brushes individually labeled and he listens to opera.”
They paint together; they paint separately. Smith’s technique, which includes glazed and overpainted photos and documents, plus bits of artist graffiti, encourages work in fits and starts as he waits for layers to dry. Ebbetts, he says, “works more consistently all day.”
Smith paints under the name Linwood and Ebbetts paints under the initials DJE.
Smith says he’s “always painted.” After attending art school, he worked in fashion design and opened his own art gallery in Atlanta in the 1990s. That’s when he started painting as Linwood. “It can be (awkward) to sell art when it’s yours,” he said. “So, I started painting under my middle name because it made it easier to sell. Everybody knows me as Palmer and only after they’d purchased — and because they loved the art — then I would identify myself. But sometimes I never told them.”
Smith began by painting figurative and landscape portraits, but his style has evolved into modern abstracts, mixing acrylic, oil, watercolor, pastel, pencil and collected items.
Ebbetts started painting later in life but quickly found the same passion as Smith. “Art is my way of externalizing how life seems to me as I look back on it and think about the energy of the people, the different periods, extreme changes, stagnations, successes and failures,” according to Ebbetts’ artist statement.
His geometry-inspired work celebrates shape, pattern, color and texture, combining fabric, plaster, paint and other materials on canvas.
Smith’s paintings generally range in price from $2,600 to $10,990; Ebbetts’ range from $1,100 to $10,500. Both accept commissions for artwork, as well as for Art Tank furniture, including cabinets, tables and desks.
Smith notes turnaround times for commissioned paintings are generally four to six weeks and explains that commissioning an Art Tank piece doesn’t add significantly to the delivery time for the furniture: The factories send him and Ebbetts drawer fronts, tabletops or cabinet doors to paint before construction of the piece begins.
“All of this is us looking toward retirement,” Smith says of their art endeavors. “I want to paint until I go out feet first. I love it — it’s my therapy. But I’m not ready for it to be my full-time job yet.”
Still, Smith says, “someday, when South + English is flourishing under someone else’s leadership,” he and Ebbetts hope to spend their days painting, maybe in that Smith Mountain Lake art studio, electronica and opera blaring.
