By his own retelling of events - a retelling that is sometimes a bit scattered, as might be expected from the mind of a struggling single dad - Shawn Smith has had more than his share of hard times during his 46 years of life. But throughout even the worst of times, Smith has found a refuge in the simplest of tools: pen and paper.

With them, he's found temporary escape, comfort, and even occasional economic salvation.

About two dozen of Smith's works - many seemingly focused on the bonds and binds of the parent-and-child relationship - are featured at the Epsom Town Library through Nov. 14.

Smith was born in Gloucester, Mass., to a family that was perhaps not atypical for the area and its times. His family - first his parents, and later his mother and a stepfather - were in dire financial straits. And as Smith tells it, his was a world where the most powerless sometimes suffered at the hands of the more powerful.

In conversation, Smith offers almost compulsively confessional, if not always linear stories of a family that seemed to inflict injury on itself. He talks of physical and emotional abuses, poverty, and a childhood in which he seems to have been so busy trying to protect siblings and evade harm that he seldom got to be a little boy.

In stunningly somber drawings and paintings, Smith seems to tell the story of those times. But the emotional content of his work is not always apparent to Smith himself.

One of the most intriguing works in Smith's Epsom show is an ink work called "Kyli and Ethan: Big Sister's Helper." As Smith tells it, the image is based on real family history: his daughter Kyli had broken her foot and was on crutches and his son Ethan, now 4, was trying to help Kyli out however he could. The image shows an older character - Kyli - facing away from

the viewer, in something of a modified wheelchair and holding a crutch. Behind the wheelchair is a child, clad only in a diaper and just out of infancy, trying desperately to push the chair along, without apparent success.

But while Smith offers his simple, real-life explanation for the image, the very starkness of the work offers something more profound. This little boy - perhaps Smith's son Ethan, or perhaps Smith himself - could be seen as trying hard to shoulder burdens he is too young and too alone to handle on his own.

When asked about the striking emotional wallop of the image, Smith was genuinely surprised.

"I never thought about that one like that at all," he said.

Even within images of hope, there are hints of despair in Smith's works. Several of the smaller pieces in his Epsom show feature angels, but the angels are bathed in a blue that makes them at once ethereal and melancholy. One of the pieces, called "Mother and Child Reunion," shows a parental figure and a child-like angel touching hands.

Smith has had no formal training as an artist, but he can remember doodling in his notebooks back to his earliest years. He primarily creates images from photographs he has taken. He sometimes outlines his work in pencil and then completes the pieces - often with just ink pen - with an insistent and confident hand.

"If you look really closely at the drawings, they are done in one continuous line," Smith said. "Once I'm going along, I know exactly where I'm trying to go with my pen."

Smith has encountered enough troubles in his life that his own path has been far less confident than that of his pen. As a teenager, he says, he and his family were essentially homeless. His family moved to a small town in New Hampshire so his mother could help care for an ailing relative, he said. The relative, in turn, provided a home for the teenaged Smith, his siblings, and his mother. But things went awry. The house was sold. And according to Smith, they ended up moving into a shack - a shack without the most basic essentials of life.

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