Cheyne Smith
From
clay sculptures to
carpentry, Calhoun
County native
Cheyne Smith has a passion for creating.
Smith has been drawing and painting since
he was a child. “[Art] has always been a
passion of mine since I was very, very small,”
he says. “But unfortunately going into art as
a career is not promising to be a lucrative
career so I went into a career that I make
good money to support my family, and I
can afford art supplies,” Smith laughed.
As a father and a Registered Nurse in the
Intensive Care Unit at Regional Medical
Center, Smith does not have a lot of free
time to spend on his art, which is partly
why he very rarely sells any of his pieces. “I
don’t really get a lot of time for art as a side
job. I’ve done commission work before, but
I found that it kind of takes something that
I love and turns it into a job, a chore, so it’s
not as fun.”
fire in the midst of trees, which he created
with both ink and acrylic, showcases some
art nouveau elements in the smoke rising
from the fire. He says that piece took about
three weeks to finish in his spare time, but
occasionally the art drives him to work
faster. “Sometimes I’ll have an intense drive
to put something on a canvas and I’ll get
it done faster because I can’t stop thinking
about it.”
While most of Smith’s work is completely
original, he also uses his talents to recreate
art he admires. The idea for the canvas of
two women actually came from a painting
he tried to buy from a friend. “She said it
was hanging in her house when she moved
in and she loved it and she never got rid of
it,” Smith says. “I tried to get her to sell it to
me and she wouldn’t so I said ‘Well, let me
take a picture and I’ll just paint my own.’ So
that’s what I did.”
“People ask me to sell my stuff all of the
time, and it’s hard for me to bring myself to
do it,” Smith explains. “Especially when it’s
something that I put a piece of myself into,
that came from me.”
With influences such as art nouveau and
abstract art, Smith seems to follow his heart
and his vision for every unique piece he
creates. “I’ll get an idea for something and
it won’t leave my head until I make it,” he
says. “I like doing some of the abstract kind
of stuff, like with stuff you kinda wouldn’t
expect to see. You have a lot more liberty
to make something how you want it to look
than how it actually looks.”
One of Smith’s most recent paintings of a
INSIGHT
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