About the Artist
S. Frank Smith is my pen name. I am one of more than 15,000 Steve Smiths in the U.S. I was born in 1948 in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle, Washington.
I was an active participant in the psychedelic movement of the late ‘60’s and participated in the “Back to the Earth” migrations into rural America in the ‘70’s.
As an adult I resided in all the West Coast states and New Mexico. For the past ten years my wife Judi and I, both retired from education, have been living in Redding California, just down the hill from Mount Shasta and Mount Lassen, on four acres along an irrigation canal with workshop, gardens, pets and chickens.
Since my childhood I have identified as an ‘artist’ which is perhaps a personality disorder as much as a ‘temperament’. I am impacted by a dramatic hearing loss since birth. This led me to an unusual point of view, being fed by visual cues far more than sound.
While in Alaska, the land of opportunity, I fulfilled nearly every goal on my early bucket list, all but one, which was to publish. Now I am sitting on over thirty years of actively developed intellectual properties in several modalities and genres.
This website is an earnest exercise in exposing to the world what I have been joyfully working on for decades in isolation. Graphics, poetry, novels, commentary and perhaps some music will surface.
It might help the viewer to know a bit about what has informed the focus of my creative quest.
Course of Study
I was a slow to thrive, spiritually inquisitive child raised in a Jesuit oriented Catholic household, drawn to the neighborhood museum, S.A.M., where I was enraptured by East Asian artifacts and Buddhist art. After a contentious Jesuit education, I brought many theological questions to an extended psychedelic vision quest which led directly to meditation practices and experiential studies of Tai Chi, Mystic Christianity, Hinduism, Shamanism, Sufism and Islam, and Vajrayana Buddhism, leading into Quantum and Energy Field studies.
I have been tagged with a few names along the way. (Shemsed’din, Sky, Tenzin, Pema Norpal)
In the end, it is all quite simple…. This is it…. It is time to wash the dishes.
The Studio
I spent two years formally studying computer graphics/digital editing in the late ‘90’s, focusing on 3D Digital Animation. Out of that came an interest in texture mapping which led to discoveries working with underlying patterns present in nature. For thirty years I have been using photography and Photoshop to research the nature of visual patterns presenting in nature, investigating how we interact with them, and what they reveal about the process at work in a physically manifesting world.I have named this body of images Portal Vortex, which describes the experience I have reading into these abstract compositions. Included in this presentation are several pieces illustrating primal factors in metaphysical principles. My body of work is eclectic, from Op-art to landscapes.
The Office
My poetry collection starts around 1990, two years after Sufi initiation. Everything I wrote before opening to the Sufi perspective was of little consequence.My first novel started as an effort to rewrite a short story. I was living in a small trailer on a horse ranch south of Santa Fe NM, recovering from a prolonged, serious health crisis. The story wrote itself over a period of six weeks, then I rewrote it over forty times over 20 years. It was the novel that taught me how to write a novel. Since then, I have completed four more. Nothing is absolutely finished till it goes to print and nothing has gone to print yet, but several are quite ripe for the picking. Genres include Literary Fiction with Magic Realism, Sci-fi Humor, and Speculative Musical Comedy.Since blogging is the medium of mass communication currently, I will be blogging.Thank you for your interest. As Mr. Rogers said, “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood. Won’t you be my neighbor?”