This is the fourth part of a five-part series, released M-F this week, called “Artist’s Talk”.  You can read the previous parts and other pieces on my newsletter archives, here.  Enjoy - and please share with anyone you think would enjoy this piece and others like it, and encourage them to sign up with their email to receive the newsletter themselves.  Onto…

Artist’s Talk: Part 4 - The Ships Bearing Their Dreams

While Seattle may have once been an Arts City, it was no longer regarded as such, with good reason.  These days it’s a strain to even see Seattle as a cultural hub, unless you can count the creep of tech and gentrification as culture.  I grew up in Seattle as its mythology was already on its way out.  I was too young to really even be interested in Pearl Jam or Nirvana until well after the peak of their cultural relevance.  In Seattle today, cultural relevance is becoming supplanted by a cynicism that I hear in contemporary conversations and media.  I can’t stand cynicism - to me it is the same as giving up.  How do you keep going, keep after a dream, when everyone around you has already given up?

Giving up on my artwork is never something that occurred to me until the end of my initial 6 months playing at being an “artist”.  I considered re-relegating myself to a lifetime of “I do this in my free time”.  A few months of serious soul-searching led me to re-double my efforts, to make an art career of what I had to offer, to somehow make it work.  I believed, at the time, that I was re-engaging with the dream, in a more pure and collaborative way, seeking out an art community and cultivating human relationships as a business plan, over sales and profit.  Additionally, I’d put myself in a better position to succeed - a healthier, more sustainable approach to life.

My work was really improving - and I felt the same joy I did as a child, drawing, painting, in touch with why I was making work, assigning it no greater importance than as a means of communicating and sharing my world, my experiences.   This was during lockdown, winter of 2020.  I saw a lot of art being made by others as a means to complain, to render injustice, to illustrate the loneliness of lockdown, the hopelessness people must have been feeling about their life and their purpose within in.

I had no interest whatsoever in such self-indulgent subject matter, not anymore.  I turned my art to a deep study of and celebration of the people in my immediate vicinity, working obsessively on portraits, on landscapes en plein air, on drawings from unhindered imagination, or whatever else I was interested in, any given time.  Mercifully, but perhaps not coincidentally, the personal work that resonated most with me also seemed to resonate most with audiences - my figure drawings, my intimate portraits of friends, family, even my sketches of the family hound dog.  Throughout lockdown, a core group of people identified themselves to me as die-hard supporters of my work, who stuck with my art, believed in it, bought it, during times when they were themselves massively unsure of most aspects of their lives.

During lockdown I heard from an overwhelming chorus of voices that their dreams were gone, that they were living unfulfilled lives, that they were desperate for there to be more but nearly resigned to the idea that maybe, for them, in this life, this was all they would ever have.  I could relate to that feeling and I’d seen evidence of it before - but before lockdown I’d had no idea that the majority of people in my life, a massive majority, were feeling and living some version of this existence, purposeless, lost, alone.

I’d had no idea.  Jackson Browne had warned me, even in high school, that following conventional tracks, that pretending to be ok with everything that’s expected of you in “normal” society, buying houses, finding love, settling down, going to work, going to war, will ultimately not bring you closer to your dreams, and that the “ships” bearing them will “sail out of sight”.

I found myself having various versions of the same conversation, over and over, which always ended with explicit or implied questions of my life, namely, “how did I do it?”  How did I find something I love, how did I connect to the world in a meaningful way, a joyful, celebratory, inquisitive way, how was I doing ok while the world seemed to be on fire?  Wasn’t I alarmed?  Wasn’t I sad?  I suppose these questions are the questions that the lost ask people they perceive to be “doing well”, but as I mentioned, nothing could have prepared me for the sheer volume of inquisition, the unbelievable number of times I kept being asked more or less the same thing.  People in their 70s and 80s told me their regrets and asked my advice.  People who had wronged me came out of their shame to issue apologies, years on, when really no apology was necessary or asked for.  Without the usual societal distractions and conveniences, or, at least, far fewer of them, these questions and admissions must have bubbled to the surface of their consciousness, maybe for the first time in their lives.  It seemed, to me, that everyone had been forced to look at their conscious living, when all the extraneous things had been stripped away, and they had only themselves in a room.

I looked at myself, too.  I had to admit that I wasn’t able to visibly see as much as I wanted to, paint as well as I wanted to, and wasn’t in a relationship that was working for either of us.  I was hungry to expand my art practice, a mission, to go where I could learn the most.  I never saw any issue with artists wanting to learn more - for me, there is no hard division between student and teacher, novice and master.  I am always learning, I am always a practitioner as I am always a student.

I gave up my life in Seattle for a new one in Santa Fe, specifically to study with a longtime mentor of mine, artist Tony Ryder, who had been for years encouraging me to try my hand at oil painting, up to that point a media I’d barely used.  What was supposed to be a stay of six weeks turned into a stay of six months.  I soaked up his lessons, and many more lessons I struggled through on my own, painting or drawing 6 hours a day, all in the studio, working on oil portraiture and still life all within the optical tradition - to attempt to paint or draw more or less what you see just as the light presents it to your eye.

My vision fundamentally changed - I’d had no idea that you could look at a color and be able to mix an oil paint to match that color optically, that is, indistinguishable from the real light.  Encouraging me was both Tony and the documentary “Tim’s Vermeer”, where an untrained artist attempts to paint a Vermeer mastercopy by using his own ocular technology.  I thought, ok, without that tech, can’t you just look at what you see, and mix paint to match it?  Isn’t that this process by another means?  In theory, sure, it’s completely possible.  Doing it is another task altogether, but it can be done.  I had expected the mastery of this technique in oil to potentially interest me for the rest of my life… but what I found instead was that this way of painting was not as challenging as I’d expected, and with time and effort, was not a lifelong challenge but another skillset.  Still life painting was extremely informative, and at times very hard… but all it took was time and attention.  Instead of a still life in the studio, more interesting to me was going outside and painting or drawing directly from life, from an unposed subject in portraiture, from a changing sunset.

It’s hard to describe in words how fundamentally my vision changed during the time studying in Santa Fe.  My work can show it better than I can say it.  I’d had no idea that the barrier to making the kind of work I’d only dreamed of wasn’t technical - it was visual.  I wasn’t trained to see or understand objectively the color I was seeing.   Now, I am.  Imagine that each color of light you see, the complete spectrum, including every variation, was objective, a specific wavelength, and could be seen for what it is, not what it represents.  To give an analogy, I see now more as a phone camera sees light - as discrete pixels, almost, except there are no pixels, only a coherent visual landscape, which can take in many subject, in any light, just the same way.  It was a switch flipped, and now that I see this way, it’s always with me, unless I lose the ability to see or to see in color.  I also believe that anyone who has gone through a similarly rigorous experience of matching paint to optical color would be able to develop this ability, too.  When I returned to Seattle, Fall of 2021, I was extremely enthusiastic to apply this new vision to every subject, but especially, to plein air landscape watercolor.

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Thank you for reading “Artist’s Talk: Part 4 - The Ships Bearing Their Dreams”, and for your questions and comments about this newsletter and my work.  You are welcome to email me any time at David@DavidOSmithArtist.com, or simply reply to this email.  If you enjoyed reading this, I encourage you to share it with your networks, and to enogucarge them to sign up with their email to receive my newsletter, the best way to stay up to date with my artwork.

Tomorrow: Artist’s Talk: Part 5 - Inevitable