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Bremerton artist Chuck Smart won Best of Show in last year's CVG statewide juried art show.
Photo by
Carolyn J. Yaschur | Kitsap Sun

Cancer Claims Bremerton Artist, Musician Chuck Smart

by Michael C. Moore
Kitsap Sun
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Bremerton artist and musician Chuck Smart died Monday morning after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

Smart's business and studio partner, M. Anne Sweet, said Smart recently made the decision to stop both dialysis on his kidneys and radiation treatments for the cancer. He entered hospice care on Christmas Eve, and both his wife, Dawn, and his brother, Sydney, were with him when he died.

"[URL]He was comfortable and received good care and Dawn was able to stay with him day and night," Sweet wrote in an e-mail to the artist's friends and associates the morning of his death.

"He was an amazing light and a creative artist spirit who never strayed from that path," wrote Sweet, who collaborated with Smart on both art and music pieces and shared studio space with him at Studio 68 on Fourth Street. "He will be deeply missed by all who knew him."

Artist and Collective Visions Art Gallery co-founder Alan Newberg, who also shared the studio space on Fourth Street with Smart and Sweet, called Smart's death "a great loss to the artists' community not only in Bremerton, but in the county and the whole state."

"I feel like I've lost a friend and fellow artist," Newberg said Tuesday morning. "He was a true creative spirit in our community."

Smart, a respected and fiercely independent artist who worked in a variety of media, won "Best of Show" honors in last year's inaugural CVG Show, a statewide juried art exhibition at Collective Visions.

"I was completely surprised," Smart said of the honor bestowed on his digital piece "Garden of Eve." "I couldn't believe it. I was off the planet."

"The show helped get me a lot of attention," Smart told the Kitsap Sun in October. "It was an opportunity to put some work in a statewide show, see what my peers are doing."

Smart's mixed media piece "Life and Death" was selected for this year's second edition of the CVG show, which will fill Collective Visions' display space during February.

The October interview was conducted at Smart's Rocky Point residence shortly after he had come home from the hospital, where he received treatment for what he called "a kidney ailment." He did not divulge that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The Smarts moved to West Sound, where Dawn was raised, when Chuck was downsized out of a position at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They lived in a borrowed house on Hood Canal for a year, then moved into Bremerton to be closer to the ferry.

"We had thought about moving to Brazil," he said. "But we came out here, and liked it. We've been here 15 years now."

Funeral arrangements are pending.[/URL]