This is the fifth and final 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 5 - Inevitable

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.

Imagine - the city you love, that you grew up in, that you’ve painted and cherished, suddenly you can see it in full brilliant color for the first time.  I’d been looking at Seattle, at my whole world, actually, in a very limited, quasi-conceptual, inattentive and dulled way of visual noticing.  Although the comparison is a bit tired, I really did feel exactly like Dorothy stepping out into Oz in color for the first time.  Suddenly every sunset, sunrise, and all the time and views in between could become subjects for paintings.  Everyone I knew and plenty of strangers could become portrait subjects, without even having to pose.  All my fantasies or dreams could now be illustrated with a visceral sense that we all crave - that they might be real, that our dreams can be shared.  Art lets us do this - share dreams.

As I stepped into the dream of being able to do with painting and drawing what I’d once only dreamed of, I tried to bring others with me, to communicate and share my newfound enthusiasms, especially back in my home city of Seattle, back from the desert, back to a city of water.  At the same time as my return, something else was afoot.  As life went “back to normal”, I noticed the same societal worries, doubts, anxieties, questioning that had surrounded me, the brutal honesty I commended my friends and contacts for confronting in their own lives… fade.  It seemed that as the distractions and comforts returned, the bars opening, the office coming together, the schools in session, slowly then completely, the moment of opportunity for my friends with un-acted-upon dreams was closing, then past.  What was once a narrative of “how do you do it, can you help me find…?” turned sour, very strange, as those same people who had come to me for help and compassion now freely and unsolicitedly dispensed advice.  Their advice, which had led them to unfulfillment, heartbreak, and loneliness, all now massaged by external validation and distraction: “give up, don’t do this, you should stop, do what I’m doing”.  Sometimes the transformation was heartbreaking, to see someone I cared about open up, begin to change their lives for the better…. And then regress to the comforts of distraction, money, societal back-slapping, endless streaming television.

I saw this rise and fall of consciousness, of introspection, mirror a rise and fall in interest in my work.  For once, the people I knew (and everyone, it seemed) went looking for answers, became curious about the conventions they had been sold as antidotes to disease, and with it came a deeper interest in artists, musicians, creative people who were able to look around and make truthful statements about the world.  As the distractions crowded back in, and it became more convenient to drink, eat, and buy their way out of discomfort, the questioning became less frequent, and my world went very quiet.

I suppose I pride myself on a work ethic to show up with discipline, whether anyone is watching and paying attention or not.  I am, as I said before, massively grateful to be here tonight, to share my work with you, but I think it’s important for at least everyone here tonight to know that I am not doing my art out of a sense of societal responsibility, or an imperative to add to or change the world.  When I go out to paint plein air, or sketch my friends, or draw my dreams, I do so for me, it’s personal, because I am intensely interested in experience, in finding out more about how human beings see and understand ourselves.  When I share my work, with you, that is the imperative.  The work is made for me, but made to be shared.  I see that people like seeing my work - so I find ways to allow that to come about.  My dream, which I at times feel sailing away, is that there can exist a reality where I am allowed to be an artist, to make art as my main charge in life, and for that to fulfill me.  I don’t know if that is possible, but I am learning as I go, fusing my love of making art with earning enough value in society to be allowed to live.

Part of that fusion is to achieve a relative level of “success”, which to me means, I am able to continue to make the work.  I don’t need to be applauded, to gain pageantry or CV lines or higher sales, I just need enough to continue to do the work.  Being here tonight is a massive step forward, because it is a very digestible metric of outward “success”, but it won’t change or affect the work I make or the way I work in the slightest.  I welcome the chance to be questioned, for your inquiries, new ideas, conversations, or simply the way you work and the work you do to inspire me.  I hope what I do can be of some use to you, either as glorified wallpaper or the chance to remember your dreams, but that’s not the same as thinking that it’s important to get a merit badge on your jacket, to win a prize, to land a big museum show.  The museum is of critical importance because it does a public service of bringing us art we may never otherwise see, may never otherwise experience during our critically short lives.  I wrote this talk because it is expected of me, but not because I wanted to.  However, I made the art because I had to.

Think of your favorite works of art, the ones that changed your lives when you saw them.  This doesn’t have to be visual art - it could be a concert, a love letter, a speech, a building, a movie.  For me there have been so many life-changing pieces of visual art, and in most cases, I didn’t have the artist in the room to tell me about the work.  While I’m not sure that having them there would’ve improved the experience for me, but I’d have jumped at that chance, impossible though it may be.  Without the artist in the room, art historians, museum curators, and anyone else informing the public about the work play such a critical role - they are the storytellers behind the cultural agents, people dedicated to giving contexts, especially when we often have so critically little from the artists themselves.  I wish I could have watched Sargent paint, or Michelangelo sculpt, or heard their inner thoughts about their work, their processes, directly from them, ideally as they worked.  We now have technologies and means of recording such data, if they only were alive to share it.

I title my plein air watercolor landscapes, and most of the other work I do, too, with the exact time and date it was made - which I’d love to know, for my own curiosity, about some of my favorite paintings and sculptures.  It astonishes me that for some of the greatest masterpieces of all time, we can only guess within tens or sometimes thousands of years as to when it was made, and how, and by whom.  While wondering in awe, speculating, imagining can be a culturally enriching pursuit, my gosh, how I would prefer to know the truth, and how much more fascinating would the reality be than even my wildest dreams.  Just as the color I see now is more real, it is endlessly more beautiful and nuanced, inspiring, fascinating, than the visual world I knew before.

I’m writing this, and presenting it, not for myself.  The work is for me, but I’ll continue to do everything within reason to make it accessible for others.  I am attempting to give the viewer what I would want from my favorite art - just that chance to hear what the artist themselves thought, what they were going through, as a point of hope, of light, of the intent and curiosity in their truthful observations.  Even if this message were only reaching one interested person, it is a justified pursuit.  I celebrate curiosity, introspection, questioning, because I am sure that by pursuing objective truths, uncomfortable realities, not convenient, distracting conventions, I do my job.

In sharing my art with you, my wish is that it can be an introduction to the truths of your own life.  We all have dreams that resonate with what is most true, and we have the capacity to wake up to them at any moment.  My rare blessing is I get to live an immediate dream, instead of chasing after one.  Perhaps with enough curiosity and questioning, and some training on how, living our dreams is not just achievable, but inevitable.

Thank you.

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Thank you for reading “Artist’s Talk: Part 5 - Inevitable”, 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.