Love it or hate it, hang it or wear it, surrealist painter Donny Smutz is out to bring your dreams--and his--to life on canvas.
People don't bring box cutters to art-gallery shows by coincidence. Indeed, when a man brought a box cutter to a gallery show in Nashville, Tennessee in 2008 he came to destroy a piece he saw as blasphemous, and he succeeded. In fact, it was mission accomplished for attacker and artist alike. In one simple act, artist and audience made a connection, and that's all this particular artist ever wanted.
Meet Donny Smutz: surrealist painter, occasional artistic provocateur and, possibly, coming to a department-store shelf near you.
Free-thinking artistry and commercialization are two paths that rarely intersect, but Smutz has been traveling down both for years. Born and raised in the small towns just outside of Kansas City, Kansas--he was born in Iola and graduated from Pittsburgh High School in 1996--Smutz grew up doodling in church and rarely paying attention to school. In kindergarten Smutz's teacher sat down with his mother and showed her drawings Smutz had done in class--not because he was in trouble, but to point out Smut's talent. When teachers started incorporating homework assignments into class later in grade school, Smutz kept drawing instead of doing them. By his early teens he was making money with his creativity, albeit in a side job painting people's homes. It brought money, though, and without resorting to the nine-to-five, gray-cubicle world Smutz couldn't stomach. Instead, he had found a comfortable way to go: living near his hometown, working as a painter and marrying his girlfriend. The pieces of Smutz's life fell into place, but a pair of catastrophic events would soon leave it bearing almost no resemblance at all.
Free At Last
In just six months Smutz was single again, heartbroken and searching for a change. In that span of time in 2005 his mother was killed in a car accident and his marriage collapsed in divorce. Smutz left life in Kansas behind to move to Joplin, where he lived for a year building motorcycles. It wasn't long, though, before he was ready to roll the dice and move again. You only live once, Smutz kept telling himself. This time he chose Nashville; Smutz says it was one of the best decisions he has ever made in his life. "The town fits me," Smutz says, though he admits it was difficult at first to get out of the small-town mindset he grew up in. After four years of living in Nashville Smutz's love for the city runs deep, and even in the wake of merciless flooding in the downtown district in early May he speaks nothing but glowingly about it. Smutz says his home and studio were on higher ground and unaffected by the disaster.
In Nashville Smutz delved back into his artistic interests, spending countless hours in his studio developing the surrealist style that so intrigued him as a boy. In a world Smutz saw as guided by rules and schedules, it was in the studio where all of those things disappeared. He could walk into the studio in the evening with a blank canvas and take abstract images and blend, melt and juxtapose them until he walked out into the world again. Smutz calls it building a story in the studio; there is no defined beginning when he comes in to paint, there is no plan for how his work progresses and the conclusion is often a mystery until a painting is finally finished. The whole process is a journey for Smutz as much as it is for his audience. Such a thing wouldn't have been possible if Smutz was still living in Kansas, though, he says; it took moving to Nashville for him to foster his creativity and to finally hone his craft. "I didn't have a style [working in Kansas] like I have now," Smutz says. "You want to set yourself apart and I didn't have that."
Smutz says his single greatest catalyst is dreams, where the mind often goes to create another world. Smutz lives his dreams rather intensely. He has suffered from night terrors ever since a case of pink eye left him with a terrific fever in the fourth grade, a problem that still affects the way he sleeps. The majority of Smutz's work is harmless eye candy--Smutz even describes some of it as "middle of the road"--but the images he sees with his eyes closed sometimes take his paintings in directions audience members find uncomfortable and, for some, blatantly offensive. The incident with the box cutter at the 2008 Nashville show is a good example. More recently, one of Smutz's pieces, titled ".GOV" and depicting President Barack Obama on a cross while being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and fed a hamburger by Ronald McDonald, was under guard during a gallery show for fear of similar violence. Smutz was never left by himself during the show, either, just in case. "One guy was really irate," Smutz says. "He said, 'Our Jesus Christ was not black.' You could tell he had some real issues inside of him."
Connect, By Any Means Necessary
One might be inclined to be afraid under such circumstances, and Smutz says he was certainly nervous at times. But the truth is the reactions his work receives, while extreme in cases such as this, are what he wants. Smutz has the same goal for his audience seeing his work that he had for himself making it: to break from the mundane, stale structure of everyday life he sees as destroying people, and to spark some deep-rooted emotions in the process. In that context, positive and negative emotions are the same thing--powerful, and therefore good. "It they're pissed off at my work, that's an ordeal I had with them," Smutz says. "I connected with them. They had a passion. They reacted to it. It's kind of like a concert where everyone else sings along to the song."
Such public outbursts are good for producing periods of recognition, but Smutz has his eye on longer-lasting connections--namely, ways to get his work into people's homes--and he's finding some unusual ways of accomplishing it. In the last year Smutz's paintings have appeared on shoes and coffee mugs in addition to the usual prints, and he says discussions are underway with the Target chain of department stores to make reprints of his less provocative pieces for sale there. Rather than go the traditional route of creating a painting and selling it to never be seen by the artist again, Smutz says he's taking approaches to get his work to a mass audience any way he can. While some artists might shun such commercialism, Smutz says for him it was a natural progression of being a consumer himself. "You go into the store [and see other artists' work on the rack] and you say to yourself, 'I can do better than that,' or, 'Man, if they'd just done this and this...,'" Smutz says.
Even his kindergarten teacher, more than a quarter of a century after his first meeting with Smutz's mother, wrote on Smutz's Facebook page online recently. He wanted to let Smutz know he had been following his work for a long time and that he always knew Smutz had it in him to become the artist he is today. For the artist, it was moving praise from one of his earliest fans and a connection that didn't take a box cutter or a shoe purchase to make. Not that either of those are bad things.
