Daniel Smith: Taking Wildlife Realism To The Next Level by Todd Wilkinson

Painter Daniel Smith, who is equal parts hermit, aesthete, and explorer of the outback, has never thought of himself as being a visual provocateur.

Who could have thought that classical wildlife art would one day be considered simultaneously accessible and avant-garde? Who would have guessed that images of animals would loom large as perhaps the most potent icons of our time?

Animals are telltale totems, not only of the past, but of a yet uncertain future. The opening of the one-man exhibition, “Animal Magnetism: The Wildlife Art of Daniel Smith” at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in 2008 was validation of Smith’s growing stature in this unique and provocative artistic genre. “In my opinion, Dan Smith is truly one of America’s great wildlife painters,” says John Geraghty, board member of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles and a prominent art collector.

Over the last decade, Smith’s original pieces have been exhibited at, or become part of permanent collections at the Eiteljorg, the Autry, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum, the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, The Bennington Center for the Arts, The Wildlife Experience, The Leanin Tree Museum of Western Art and the Ella Sharp Museum of Art and History.

Today, Smith and his wife, Liz, the parents of three grown children, live at the end of a dirt road outside of Bozeman, Montana at the edge of a national forest.

Smith resides here, he says, to maintain a connection to the real wild West. For the artist, it is, by design, never far away, as evidenced by the photographs he has taken of mountain lions, moose, black bears, elk, and mule deer that roam just beyond the vaulted window of his studio. “One of the most rewarding and inspiring elements of my job is the fieldwork,” Smith says. “It is the genesis of all of my paintings.”

Were one to walk out the back door and head south, a line of rugged shark-toothed peaks running the length of the Gallatin Range are the only thing separating him from Yellowstone National Park. Between his studio vantage and America’s first national park are no major highways, no permanent development, no glow of light pollution, no sounds of honking horns or rush-hour traffic.

Even as the West wrestles with issues of human population growth, Smith’s secluded sanctuary, with the expansion of grizzly bears and wolf packs in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, has actually become wilder. It is this feeling of the untamed that he draws upon every morning when he rises before dawn to catch a glimpse of the returning sun and heads into his airy creative space surrounded by artifact touchstones collected during his global travels.

“When viewing the art of Dan Smith I am impressed by the meticulous attention to detail, the purity of realism and conspicuous depth of knowledge in his subject matter,” Geraghty says. “Dan is unique in his approach to painting. He straddles that line of photorealism with a masterfully painterly style. He has an ability to capture the personality of his subjects at that magic moment in time. All aspects of his painting are precise and he continues to challenge himself. He has a wonderful foundation in drawing ability, understands composition and has mastered control of light, shadow and color values. I’ve observed his continued progress over the last several years.”

A native of the Minnesota prairie, where epic retreating glaciers left behind thousands of sparkling lakes and waterways, Smith, who prefers painting in acrylic, was raised in a culture where daily interaction with nature is part of his DNA. It is a state where the jeweled presence of water leaves a permanent impression on the psyche—a constant incurable longing to submerse oneself in the elements.

His esteemed portfolio has trajected its own wide arc, encompassing enough miles of travel and reflection, to wrap around the world many times. His unquenchable thirst to research the setting for every landscape painting has taken him to the wildest corners of both the northern and southern hemispheres. He has spent weeks observing bears, wolves and moose beneath the big shouldered slopes of Mt. McKinley in Alaska; he has tromped through the southern African bush to study Cape Buffalo, lion, and rhinoceros; he was gone afield to help welcome the return of lobos to Yellowstone with fresh paintings commemorating the event; and he has sat beneath the prairie sky, transfixed by the whirring roar of thousands of migratory waterfowl wings passing overhead.