ART OF A LIFE Trials and Passions of a Contra Costa County Artist
	January/February 2005

by Diana E. Smith
Photos by Russell Byrne

I’ve been doing art since I was a child. I remember all the other kids in my first grade classroom being jealous of me because after completing an art assignment, the teacher said that my picture was the best.

That first-grade drawing of a horse was a forerunner of a lot of pictures that subsequently followed, because I’ve had a lifelong love for horses. I’ve always wanted one and never have been able to have one of my own. I think that never actually experiencing horse ownership was ultimately good for me because it forced me to obsess with pictures.

My earliest artistic medium was a piece of typewriter paper and a #2 pencil. From the beginning I shied away from finger paints, play dough, paper mache, and all the other “sloppy arty” media that most kids love to muck around with.

I think I disliked the typical grammar school art stuff for the same reason my classmates loved it. I wanted to do detail things. From the beginning my art focused on nuances and subtle features that you simply can’t get with your fingertip or with a gob of clay — at least when you are a third grader.

Detail and light have remained at the core of my art until now. When people look at one of my horses, for example, I want them to be able to see the muscles in his shoulder and the fine lines of the tail and mane that stream out behind him as he goes galloping into a fading sunset.

I won a prize in an art show when I was eight years old. I can’t remember where the show was held, but I remember being both pleased and astonished by the honor.

Selling Out and Falling Down
I took an earlier detour around the pursuit of artistic excellence. As a way of helping my fellow students like my art without having stupid feelings of jealousy, I taught myself to create hilarious caricatures of our teachers and of unpopular classmates. The kids loved that, of course, since all children enjoy anything evil that can make them laugh.

I went from doing things I really liked to do to more cartoony pictures that would make people happy, or at least make them laugh. I guess I sold out to popular tastes at a remarkably young age.

I spent my seven grades in the Piedmont Hills district of Oakland with a silver spoon sticking prominently out of my young mouth.

The life of a rich kid is usually dysfunctional, but only in a covert fashion, for the most part. The life I was leading wasn’t in any sense a real life, but the unreality of it was maintained through the expenditure of a truly amazing amount of money.

The real world came bursting in on me at the age of 12 when my parents got divorced and the fantasy world I had been living in was gone with the wind.

In the space of a few days I was driven from my pampered lifestyle and thrust into a public school environment in Oakland. I had a big problem as a confused pre-teen trying to figure out how to fit into the bewildering culture in which I suddenly found myself.

Nothing had prepared me for the shock of that experience. The bussing wars were going on at the time. The covert racism of Anna Head was replaced almost overnight by the overt brutality of Oakland Public education. Things were really hot both in the classroom and in my home.

A Walk on the Wild Side
I began to spend a lot of time away from home and started on a downhill slide into a wild lifestyle as the social boundaries and restraints that had formerly surrounded me slipped away. I developed into a pretty wild teenager.

Art once again became one of my coping mechanisms. My experiences as a wild one became the genesis of creativity for a series of drawings of an anything-goes style, depicting subjects that were fantastic and weird.

Everyone loved it when I showed up at one of those wild parties, got out my pencil and paper, and begin doing my freaky, often-vulgar little pictures.

For 15 years I lived a life of partying, high times, booze, and drugs.

Drugs only give an illusion of enlarging a person’s life. The pathetically diminished character of my life inescapably led to the death of my muse. For the next ten years I did not create a single worthwhile picture, drawing, or even a sketch.

I finally came to clarity about myself, and one Christmas Morning, following a week of binge drinking, I checked into an emergency room. While sitting in the lobby waiting to be admitted, I saw a small Narcotics Anonymous book.

The staff in the emergency room never noticed me walking out the door, but it didn’t matter because that little book defined the content of the commitment that I had made the night before on my apartment stairs while looking up at the stars.

I experienced a complete transformation and my life turned around 180 degrees. I got into Recovery and went back to school. My newfound transformation contributed immensely to my work with at-risk students in inner city schools.

My muse gradually came back and I began doing art, starting with the cartoon techniques from my childhood, but this time used for positive purposes. My first series was Krappy the Clown. I drew Krappy on my hand, sometimes, and he would talk to the kids about appropriate behaviors and attitudes. Krappy started showing up on blackboards. He also began to appear in a line of comic books, which the kids and teachers would buy.

Lending a Hand to Other Wounded People
I received an M.A. from J.F.K. University and am working toward my M.F.T. (Marriage and Family Therapist) license. I am currently counseling individuals in several capacities.

My passion for art and my desire to help others are coming together these days as I’m utilizing art therapy techniques with many of my clients. Art therapy is particularly helpful for psychotic or otherwise challenged people who are unable to vocalize their feelings and attitudes, but can communicate these things via their artistic expression.

Many of my clients gain a sense of their own individuality as they pour out their souls through the processes of creativity. I’m continually amazed by the purity and the power of the works that these people are able to produce. My clients apparently lack the filters that seem to usually inhibit the creative output of most people.

Moreover, the process of creation often provides my clients with a sense of dignity that was commonly lacking in any other part of their lives.

Many of the clients that I work with have issues involving trauma, substance abuse, intrapsychic, and interpersonal difficulties — all the horrid things that I endured myself. I am convinced that my clients are able to freely share their life experience with me because they sense that I know just what they are talking about, as the Bible says in the phrase about how “Deep calleth unto deep.”

The awful things from my past seem, miraculously, to have somehow been converted into assets. My experiences have helped me to understand others’ experiences, and to offer non-judgmental assistance. It was an expensive “education,” but well worth it!

My checkered history also permits me to assist others who are in recovery; my antennae are out for troubled souls. I often run into desperate people and can say, “I know just what you are going through!”

Practicing Art Outside the Lines
As I embraced my recovery I returned to my art with the joyful abandon of a relieved woman rushing back to the arms of lost love. I threw myself into creating art in the absence of rules and boundaries. I am glad I never went to art school because I began to do all the things all art instructors would have told me not to do.

I wasn’t doing art by any formulas, but simply began creating pictures that spoke to me. At times I’ll put a watercolor wash underneath a pastel painting. Or I’ll use whiteout or a black pen to create a special effect.

I learned a lot from a friend who was attending the Academy of Art. I tried to understand what she was showing me, but I often wasn’t willing to follow her advice.

“You’re doing everything wrong!” she would wail at me. “You can’t do that!” But I was beginning to make a lot of money with my art. My pieces often spoke to people.

I spend twenty hours a week on creating my fine art. I have studios in Stinson Beach, Antioch, and Pacheco. I need the variety the various locations provide. I like to go to Stinson Beach, for example, get into some really shabby clothes, eat oysters, and paint my heart out.

Learning for a Lifetime
I’ll never quit learning and growing in my art, but I want to do informal learning from now on. Da Vinci said, “Learn from the masters. After you learn everything they know then study nature.”

I consider Brentwood’s Bill Weber to be one of the current masters. He will be my mentor as I explore a new love: oil painting!

I read books about art and studied the works of many artists. I’ve learned a lot from artists who have styles completely different than my own, but whose works, nevertheless, incorporate the reasons I like to paint. For example, some of the best works of artists I love point to a magnificent truth — that there’s beauty to be found in the most horrible things.

For example, I love people like Bosch and Goya, whose works depicted a world in which images of grace coexisted with scenes of horror.

I especially enjoy the works of the Eighteenth Century Dutch artist Vermeer. I love the light that typically shines from the left of his pictures, imparting a quality of luminescence to his scenes. Such an effect always hints at a wonderful symbol for life, in my opinion.

In spite of all the changes that have come into my life since I won recognition for that horse when I was eight years old, I still strive to get detail and light into my pictures. I try to create pictures that move people in their spirit.

I’m going to show my pictures at the Brentwood Business and Technology Center for three months, beginning in February. I’ll be there myself on February 2, from 6 to 8 p.m. Come on by. I’ll show my pictures to you personally. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.

Diana E. Smith
925-685-6283
Image2art@hotmail.com
www.image2art.net