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

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 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.