A Most Unusual Canvas, Jeremy Smith is using a pressure washer to bring his art to a new medium.
Jeremy Smith is an artist.
While he’s probably best known for his wood sculptures around town, Smith is trying his hand at something entirely new. And there’s no real blueprint for how to do it.
He’s creating two dimensional art using a pressure washer. Using a high-powered jet of water, he draws elaborate designs, words and images on dirty surfaces. And the results are incredible.
He enjoys it so much he has created a brand — Mista Spot — with its own Facebook page to showcase his designs.
“I borrowed a friend’s pressure washer to clean off my driveway one day,” Smith said. “I guess I was just fooling around with the water and wrote the words ‘pressure washing’ on the ground and realized I could do a lot of other things.”
He’s created these unique designs in a friend’s driveway and his first customer for pressure washing art was a cigar shop, Cedar and Smoke Cigars in Cedartown. His swirls and circular design also incorporated a cigar with smoke swirling from it as well as the shop’s name.
“This is all new,” Smith said of the artform. “It’s a very unexpected avenue. You gotta go where the road takes you sometimes. I don’t normally consider myself a two-dimensional artist. I’m a sculptor.”
He said creating art with a pressure washer is basically working in reverse. Imagine starting a drawing with a sheet of already penciled paper and erasing the design into it.
“I sketch out the design beforehand,” he said. “You have to have a plan for what you’re doing because you can’t put the dirt back after you’ve removed it with the pressure washer. Once it’s gone, you’ve lost it.”
Smith is currently working on a 7,600-foot mural of massive sunflowers near the College and Career Academy. And he’s open to other commissions as well.
“There are no shortages of walls and driveways in Rome,” he said. “Even parking lots. The sky’s the limit on what you can do.”
Local businesses may want their logos in their parking lots or driveways. Homeowners may want cool designs or messages in their carports.
Smith is experimenting with a concrete sealer to help his designs last. He said wet conditions really make his designs stand out.
Anyone interested in seeing more photos and videos of Smith’s pressure washing creations can search “Mista Spot” on Facebook. They can also use the page to contact him for commissions.
“I can’t wait to see where this goes,” Smith said. “I’ve only talked to one pressure washer artist about this. There’s not a whole lot of people doing this anywhere. But once more people see it, I think more people will want it. What you’re looking it is sort of a sepia-toned wallpaper for you driveway that will really pop when it rains.”