Today we’d like to introduce you to Daniel Smith.
Hi Daniel, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was raised in New York in a loud but affectionate family despite being an inherently quiet person. I observe and internalize the world around me, which likely lead me to process my experiences through art. Drawing became painting became digital art became animation. I was an anxious kid, and when the world felt big and endless, in creating, I could fill the space. I was eager to leave home at 18 and took my first year of college in Florence, Italy, studying studio art. It was a great experience, but realizing I would never get a job in America with a fine arts degree from Italy, I finished my undergraduate degree in New York. Feeling stuck in the perpetual sameness of my environment, I moved to Los Angeles for grad school at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Film felt like the epitome of art in scale and lucrativeness. Once there, however, I just kept falling back into illustration and design. Creating posters for short films and pitch decks with intricate layouts. Putting pencil to paper felt more natural than standing on set. It was an extremely expensive miscalculation but an arguably valuable one.
I finished USC just before the pandemic. I had a degree that was adjacent to my passion, minimal professional experience, and a world closed down before me. Across an onslaught of roadblocks, the only action I could fall back onto was my basal instinct: draw. I decided to start posting my art. Gingerale_Arthaus on Instagram – being a redhead, I’ve always taken an odd amount of pride in the ‘Ginger’ mantle, and a whiskey ginger is essentially the only alcohol I’ll drink. “Arthaus” felt obnoxiously highbrow in a way that mocked my own art collection before anyone else could. I’d post rough sketches at first, random doodles. I told myself to prioritize consistency over quality to start. Just wanted to create something and have it exist somewhere in the world. I had 11 followers for a while. My boyfriend and a few people from school or odd jobs who I could only imagine were being polite. But I actively told myself I wasn’t creating for clout or attention.
I started experimenting more. Pulling inspiration from Lichtenstein’s pop art, Petra F Collin’s embrace of eerie femininity, and Miles Johnston’s evocative surrealism. I used art to explore my loneliness in the pandemic and my evolving relationship with queerness and femininity. Creating the art became more of a diary entry than a sketchbook.
Soon, more followers came. Starts and stops of hundreds, then thousands of new folks. Eventually, artists that I followed for years would comment on my posts. Some started to follow me back. I felt a level of respect and community in the art space that I had long assumed was a pipe dream. Commissions are regular now, including an ongoing partnership designing murals for Walmarts across America. I can’t claim to be an influencer. My following is still relatively modest, but I’ll continue to create. It’s not really a choice.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve had many blessings in my journey, but it hasn’t been without its challenges. While I pride myself on having an unusual mind, I’ve learned I have a just-as-unusual physiology. I’ve experienced an atypically high number of weird, unrelated medical phenomena. This includes extremely rare adult Meckle’s Diverticulitis, essentially meaning my intestines collapsed like a telescope closing. Further, a simple procedure to fix it was done incorrectly and lead me to live in the hospital for over a month without the ability to eat or even drink water. Fascinatingly, after about three days of not be allowed to consume water orally, I began to hallucinate, which may inform some of my more surrealistic art. Just this past year, I was in and out of the hospital with extreme head pain; when I stood up, it felt like someone was setting a fire on my skull from the inside. After several unnecessary procedures from misdiagnoses, I was told I had spontaneous Cerebral Spinal Fluid leaks, meaning I was somehow leaking spinal fluid, which usually only occurs after some sort of extreme spinal trauma (of which I had none). I was in and out of the hospital for months, unsure if I would be able to walk from day to day from the pain. I essentially spent months in bed, unable to even sit up. After a particularly unpleasant Emergency Room visit, I spoke with my sister, a Nurse in New York who happened to know a CSF leak specialist. I was flown out, and upon suspicion of an even rarer condition, I was sent to several hospitals across New York for specialized equipment to confirm the diagnosis: CSF Venus Fistula. In my simplified understanding, this meant that somehow a blood vessel connected to my spine and was siphoning spinal fluid into my circulatory system. Most of the doctors had never seen it, students came in to ask questions, and the hospital asked to run a story on me. After one procedure (the first of its kind at their hospital), I was back to standing and walking within 2 weeks. I’d taken a long time off of art for those months; the physical toll of sitting up made it impossible. But getting back to drawing was one of my first priorities. My work focuses on making dark themes feel lighter, and I’d collected a lot of darkness.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I love the spectrum of art – drawing, painting, graphic design, film, photography; however, I’m known for my illustration. I’ve always had an affinity for drawing portraits of women in particular. This is largely informed by being raised predominantly by my mother and sisters, as well as a larger conversation around embracing femininity. I remember one time in middle school, I was really proud to have drawn a puppy in art class, only to mocked by the boys in my class, so I didn’t bring it home. I’ve had a generally privileged relationship with my queerness but was so conditioned to suppress anything outside the fringes of masculinity, especially as a gay man, that when I started posting my art, I’d avoid the color pink or hearts or anything that could be deemed too girly. Instead, I leaned into my passion for surrealism, monsters, and horror elements. Dark themes brought me peace and felt somehow more societally acceptable. But I didn’t like setting parameters on my creations. As my confidence in the art grew, my willingness to embrace that femininity evolved. Over time, realizing monsters could be pastel and horror could be gentle made for more interesting art. Now when I draw my portraits, I picture these women as both superheroes and monsters, masculine and feminine, human and divine. I think my art takes people to places their minds may not go or were conditioned not to go. I play with shock and curiosity within color and form. I merge people with animals, I reinvent logic around color and anatomy, and I surpass the parameters of physics. I don’t set rules for myself anymore; I just start drawing and try to be honest.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you, and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
The pandemic taught me to embrace the quiet. I often felt like my disposition was a poor fit with the world, even more so within Los Angeles. I’m not loud or audacious; I envied the bold social nature of the LA archetype. I’m pensive and analytical and, at times, cold, but I’ve always liked the way my mind worked. That said, I understood the world relied on interpersonal relationships, of which I doubted my skills. I was always behind the curb in the world before Covid-19. I don’t want to romanticize 2020, but I have to acknowledge its bittersweet lessons. With the world essentially motionless, I felt permission to dive deeper into my introversion. Unhealthy, maybe, but an interesting adventure within itself. Interrogating my own mind allowed me to commit more to my art, examine the stranger corners of my imagination, and operationalize my need to create art. I liked the quiet; it was too much and not enough at the same time. It reminded me of myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.danieljamessmithart.com
- Instagram: @Gingerale_Arthaus
