Interview with Mark T. Smith
Born in Wilmington, Delaware he moved to New York City in the mid-eighties to study at Pratt Institute – Brooklyn. After matriculating from Pratt he made New York City his home until June 2004 when he relocated to Miami. Smith spent 14 years in Miami relocating to Oahu, Hawaii for a year and finally making Seattle his home in 2018.
How would you describe yourself and your artwork?
My work and myself are opposite in many regards.
I am not the typical artist that one might imagine in your mind’s eye. My pursuits outside of the Arts are seemingly opposite from the creative world that it would surprise most. I am a serial entrepreneur and my skills in the business world are on par with my abilities as an artist. People find this perplexing at first. However, when we strip away the facades and preconceived notions, these disparate activities are just problem solving. It was my discipline as an artist that gave me these cogent skills that are equally at home in the painting studio as the board room. Facing a blank canvas is comparable to facing the unknown in business. My love of the process of creation has served me well in both domains.
How do you go about beginning a new piece? Do you have an idea already in mind, or do you start working with materials or sketches to find the departure point?
I have two distinct ways to approach the creative process. The first is working on the “known”. To me, this means starting the creative process with a clear idea of exactly what I want to produce as a finished work. This is a process that is linear - observation, research, sketches, revised sketches and finally a “finished” work. I learned this process in school. I perfected it over decades of commissions when the output was the critical delivery and there needed to be consensus on the communication. This is the realm of the conscious mind.
The other approach that I deploy I call the “unknown”. This process is where I directly address the canvas or paper without any planning whatsoever. This process often yields works that ultimately move me forward and helps to make changes in my material processes. It also yields a high percentage of what I consider breakthrough works. This is a process filled with surprises, dead-ends, and delights. It is also a much longer process in terms of yielding “finished” works. This is primarily the realm of the unconscious mind.
Of course, on any given work, I might toggle between these two approaches.
When do you think your most prolific time of day or week is?
I am a disciplined and extremely prolific artist, and as such, I do not have a time of day or place. Not even the lack of proper materials would stop me from producing work. I am in a constant state of production. It took many years of studio practice to enter and ultimately master a flow state. At first, it was a delicate and easily disrupted mindset, but after decades, I can access the flow state anytime on demand.
What is a barrier you as an artist overcame? Is there anything that enabled you to develop your work as an artist in your life?
The real turning points for me as an artist were about 4 years apart.
As a young child obsessed with creativity, it was always part of my everyday life. When I was in my late teens, I was hospitalized with a life-threatening illness of unknown origin. After facing mortality at that young age, I clearly remember looking out over the city of Philadelphia from my hospital ward. It was a dark night with heavy rainfall. At that point in my life, I felt helpless - like a spectator in my own life. Looking out across that dreary scene, I resolutely decided that if my life span was not under my control, facing an illness that would be part of my life forever and could at any time end my life, that I would do exactly what I wanted with the time that I had here. I decided then and there that I would pursue the Arts as my life’s work. I have never thought again about that decision, even in the hardest times or best of times. I remain resolute to this day.
The second turning point was moving to New York City after matriculating from high school to pursue this life. This was the adult manifestation of that decision 4 years earlier. At that point it went from a dream to a goal.
Did you have an idea of what you wanted to create right from the beginning?
Yes. I never wanted to be anything other than an artist. As a young child, I spent most of my time creating works of art. I was a relatively quiet child, preferring to spend my time alone drawing. I do not have any true recollections about what motivated me to express myself in a visual format, but as a child, I produced a tremendous amount of visual works. I do remember that I was (and I still am) happiest when exploring my own imagination. There was never a point in my life when anything has remotely come close to that desire.
Finding my personal language was a slow process taking the better part of a decade to finally manifest. Until that happened, I submersed myself in the process and leveraged my discipline to create the works for which I am now known.
What is the meaning or creative inspiration for your work? We’re curious what the narrative or story is to what you are producing?
The meaning of my work has changed over the years, as my career has matured and progressed. Through travel and study, I absorb ideas, techniques, subject matters from the world around me. I then create works that attempt to be as universal as possible by reconstituting all of this in my own way. To that end, I started to include Jungian archetypes and every culture that I come in contact within my travels and daily life.
For the early part of my career, my work was somewhat classical in approach... observe from life and then translate that into my own personal visual language. After decades of continuous work, I took time to catalog my work in the mid-2000s. A long and laborious process for an artist as prolific as myself. At the conclusion of this survey of my life’s work to date, I made a surprising discovery. I was much more interested and engaged in the process of making visual works than in the production of “final” works. This transformed the way I thought about my work.
Besides your artworks, are there any other things in life that your voice as an artist may consider vital or valuable? What makes you joyful and creative, in other words?
Because the life of an artist in nonlinear and there is little correlation between how hard you work and success as an artist, I prefer to pursue linear interests outside of my artistic life. For me this has taken the form of restoring vintage automobiles and motorcycles.
Are there any exhibitions or places where people can see these beautiful creations in person soon? Anything on the horizon?
I have a solo exhibition scheduled for this summer in Washington DC, my first in a few years. It’s wonderful that DC was host to my very first solo exhibition back in 1994. It feels like a homecoming of sorts.
Websites: https://www.marktsmith.com
