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

"Nature is full of abstractions," Smith says. "It can exist in the mat of centuries-old lichen on an ancient piece of rubble granite that once stood at the top of mountain or in a vast landscape that seems to be constantly changing in light and shadow."

For Smith, conveying mood is about speaking to the eternal mystery of light, and the atmospheric influence in perception of color. Wildlife does not exist as a prop on the stage of a scene; it is an extension of a great landscape painting and all of the elemental forces that the human mind's eye knows as beauty.

"I respect Dan's work," says renowned Western and figurative painter Howard Terpning, who owns an original Smith interpretation of a polar bear. "I think that he carries his wildlife beyond conventional stereotypes. To me the things that I see are very personal and intimate portraits." One enduring example is "In Your Face", a full-framed portrait of a Cape Buffalo that Smith encountered during one of his many forays to half a dozen nations in sub-equatorial Africa.

Smith's interpretations have been described by art historians as "photo-realism," meant to suggest a literal translation of detail, color, and pose. Indeed, the technological advancement of photography during the 20th century has had undeniable influence. Artists, after all, are a reflection of their time and few artists, if they are astute, ignore tools that enable them to glean more information.

There isn't an informed student of art alive today who is unfamiliar with the contributions of Eadweard Muybridge, the English-born pioneer of photography, whose presentation of sequential freeze-frame images of running animals, were an epiphany for painters struggling with trying to convey the physiology of motion. Building upon the insights that Muybridge and others delivered, Smith and his contemporaries have transformed wildlife scenes from being static and stoic into dramatic illusions of animation. Smith's piece, High Country Rush, as just one example, summons adrenalin as a grizzly bear appears to charge out of the frame onto the viewer.

Or consider the painting, "Zero Tolerance" of an African elephant chasing a pair of lions. The work went on national tour with the Society of Animal Artists and today resides in the permanent collection of the Hiram Blauvelt Art Museum.

Smith has assembled an exhaustive library of photographic reference but he will be the first to acknowledge the profound limitations of the camera. Slides and digital memory do not posses the scents of being outdoors, the visceral response of meteorological conditions, and the archetypal mystery that is encapsulated in certain kinds of fading or advancing sunlight.

It is along this boundary line where the role of artist as information gatherer ends and the assertion of personal statement begins. And it is here where Dan Smith has carved out his own terrain. Smith is grouped within a small fold of photorealists against which the works of other artists are measured. They are Bateman, Ray Harris Ching, and Carl Brenders.