Finally my wife says, Stop talking about it and
just do it, the artist said of his motivation. Now
thats what I do. Every day I wake up in the morning and I make art. And I
am so, so, so happy. Its like I finally figured out what Im going
to do when I grow up, and at my age, its about time.
One can see snippets of Smarts lifes ambition this
month at the Old Town Custom Framing and Gallery shop as it presents his show
All the Things Youd Be By Now if Sigmund Freuds Wife was Your
Mother. It will be on display through Sept. 30, while a digital gallery
of Smarts work is online at www.chucksmart.com.
Smarts art is rooted in photography, highlighted by
creative digital work. His images transform simple photographs to framed pieces
of fine art in a way some critics might not consider that artistic.
People think if you work on computer that youre
just pushing buttons ... but its a lot more than that, Smart said.
A lot of my stuff is photo-based, but I consider it more fine art. I try
to take them out of their pure photographic form and make it more like a
painting. To do so he uses Adobe Photoshop on a Mac platform. But when he
began he wasnt even computer literate. He actually traded one of his
collage pieces for a copy of the Photoshop software before he even had a
computer.
And then I got a Mac and just locked myself in the
basement, Smart said. After about a month, I made my first
image.
Now the studio which he and M. Anne Sweet share on Fourth
Street in Bremerton is full of portraits and modeled pictures and a new avenue
where Smart is headed of late abstraction. This show should be a
cross-section.
Ive always been an artist and musician type,
he said.
He
actually is a musician, a percussionist, and a bit of a gypsy as well. During
the 1960s, Smart expatriated to Europe, buying a one-way plane ticket to
Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Spontaneously, sometime thereafter he decided that he was going
to drive all the way to India, crossing a dozen different countries without a
map, just collecting music and experiencing a myriad of cultures along the way.
That sense of adventure has paved the way for the many stories even more
intense than that which Smart could tell.
He brings his international sensitivities and experiences
to the work he creates ... his work is unlike anything currently in
Kitsap, the Old Town Gallery said in its press release.
Smart frequently begins with a photograph and works on it with
the tools and palette available to him in Photoshop, creating a painting which
he then prints out on a giant-sized ink jet color printer, using high-quality
archival papers and inks, and puts out to the world.
Youre always trying to sell your work, but what
Ive learned is creating a body of work is more important than selling a
piece, he said, noting his quest is to create a legacy through his works
which will survive when he dies. Its there, Im gone, no one
can criticize me or ask me about it, its just theres the work ...
proof that I was on this Earth. |