Arts Rescue Mission -Aid For Aging Artists
P u b l i s h e d W e e k l y, N e w s, A r t s, & S t o r i e s F r o m T e x a s
Vol. 1, Issue 3,
Oct. 28, 2025
page 2
My Halloween Birthday
by Mark S. Smith Oct. 26, 2025
My birthday is on Halloween. I’ve had 70+ opportunities to contemplate this special evening. As a child I did not understand the ruckus and felt it was a bit of drama in search of a backstory. Some years later as a tween, the holiday felt too much like a candy smash and grab and it left me feeling awkward at best.
As an art student in NYC in my early twenties I experienced a true reckoning on my first chilly Halloween night. It was a transformative scene, a citywide stage set, a blowout montage of cultures that spilled into streets filled with laughing gas and long marching processionals of red Solo cups and squeals.
Halloween was a street side pop-up symphony of Jazz, Salsa music, Irish Bars playing the Van Morrison, and Marvin Gaye’s Inner-City Blues pouring out of clubs with deep bass lines rolling across the city with sweet and bitter notes that lingered forever. All the time it was really fall that stole the show with crisp fluttering amber leaves, crystal-clear night lights and cold winds that made you stop and breath in slowly..
Many years later as an artist and art historian I more fully understood the network of global connections that fill in the missing Halloween storyline. You don’t have to be mystical or simply like to celebrate to appreciate the magic and mystery of Autumn. Looking at this tradition in hindsight we might respectfully update and pass forward what we have learned. Halloween is a fall celebration of the collective “us” in all our beautiful costumes and diversity. Look, touch and act with a kind heart and honor Mother nature as she offers up this special season.
And my costume of choice is that of an artist at various stages of life looking straight ahead …..
My Blood Sunday: Vanilla Ice Cream, cold Blueberry juice and a shot of Cointreau.
Photo credits Mark S. Smith
What Mark Writes About His Work:
After decades as a studio artist, I have found a way of building a painting that perfectly suits my need to work with physical materials and processes that express my passion for color and abstraction. The process is slow and progressive layering. The pigment is spread in controlled layers using very thin and flexible aluminum blades, surgical grade Teflon scrapers and an assortment of large and small soft synthetic bristle brushes.
As the paintings evolve, the color is sometimes washed away with a mist of water, smeared carefully with rags and scrapers and heated with controlled temperature so a top layer of colors can be added. In essence, what I do allows me to work in quick sweeping gestures and equally in slow and nuanced detail. In this process, paint can flood, move, and drift over the surface with organic energy.
The painting process hints at the feeling of slow geological movement, metamorphosis, and surface topography. Every artist has a unique process and a period of reflection before starting a new body of artwork. I do months of research exploring a topic I find interesting and challenging. Usually it’s related to music, architecture, the natural sciences or cultural history. It’s detective work that leads to unfamiliar places, expanded ways of thinking, and refreshes creative potential.
refreshes creative potential.
The process starts by studying, reading, and collecting digital images that are added to the large digital image library I started years ago. The library is also a photographic archive of my own paintings and is always growing. To date, there are over 20,000 images. Next, I use specialized software, a digital stylus and a touch sensitive pad (Corel and Wacom) as well as digital drawing media to manipulate, deconstruct, “recombine” and rebuild the images as nonrepresentational and abstract fields of color, shape, texture and pattern.
The new images are a carefully considered blend/mix of my art with the new researched subject matter. These recombines become prototypes and studies for making physical paintings. At the end of the day, the measure of joy or success is always reflected by my surprise and wonderment. Each body of work is based on a thematic concept inspired by music, architecture, or science. Explore their stories.