1940 –
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1940 and living in Clancy, near Helena, Montana.
When Smith was 12, his family moved from Minnesota to Pinedale in search of a drier climate for his mother and brother, who both suffered from asthma. The landscape was “a lot more wild and wooly” than anything he’d ever experienced, and Smith quickly fell in love with the natural world. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Wind Rivers after high school, and that “got me into the mountains,” he says, “and I got to know them. It was a good way to grow up.”
Smith was attracted to art at an early age, and he took naturally to drawing. But with no art classes at his small rural school, he was self-taught until he attended the University of Wyoming, where he majored in mathematics and minored in art. After graduating, he and his high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Jean, moved to Helena, Montana, where he worked as a computer programmer and systems analyst for the state for eight years while painting on the side. In 1971, with Jean’s support, Smith replaced the keyboard with an easel and tried to make it as a full-time artist.
Smith’s big break came in 1990, when he won the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum’s prestigious Prix de West Purchase Award for his painting “Return of Summer.”
In 1994, William Kerr commissioned Smith to paint Jackson Hole’s National Elk Refuge, resulting in “The Refuge,” a 36-by-120-inch piece that has been a signature in the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s collection ever since. This marked the beginning of a long relationship, and the venue has since hosted numerous exhibitions featuring the artist’s work.
Smith has also participated in most of the country’s major Western art events, picking up a number of awards along the way, including the Pix de West’s 1996 Robert M. Lougheed Memorial Award; the 1999 Thomas Moran Memorial Award for Painting at the Autry Museum’s Masters of the American West; the 2007 Autry National Center’s Trustees’ Purchase Award; and the 2008 Governor’s Art Award through the Wyoming Art Council, among many others.