Using the Wind River Range as his sandbox, Tucker Smith continues to bring nature to life in Wyoming and beyond.
Stand anywhere high up in the Wind River Range—on peaks named Gannett, Knife Ridge, Desolation, Klondike, Wolfs Head and Bears Tooth—and you’re treated to an endless buffet of views below. Glacier-carved basins lined with snow. Emerald lakes that seem to defy the color spectrum. Deep river valleys with pockets of dense forest.
It’s some of the most beautiful land in America. The land of Carl Rungius, Albert Bierstadt and Alfred Jacob Miller. It’s also the land of Tucker Smith, the Wyoming painter who has been coming to this magical place since he was a boy.
“My first time in the Wind River Mountains was with my father and the scout master, and some other scout when I was 14 or 15,” Smith says. “Later, in college, I would work for the forest service on a trail crew. At that time I didn’t even take a camera, so I don’t even have pictures from those early trips. I certainly remember them, though.”
Smith, one of the most prominent and respected landscape and wildlife painters working today, started taking annual trips to Wind River—called the “Winds” by some—in 1988. Over the years, they became therapeutic retreats for artists, including some of the top artists in the country. “We’d go every summer. Clyde Aspevig was there at the beginning, and then later we’d go with Chris Blossom, Bill Anton, Ralph Oberg, Andy Peters, Lanny Grant, Katherine Turner…a bunch of artists who were very serious about painting,” the artist says. “We used to a do a lot of backpacking and canoeing, but nowadays we mostly go on horseback.”
Being in a place that commands such beauty reminds an artist of their goals, their dreams and of the challenges that await them, Smith says—“these places change us.”
Beginning May 23, the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, will present Tucker Smith: A Celebration of Nature, a new retrospective on the influential Wyoming painter. It will draw from all corners of his career, including some of his earliest works in the mid-1970s, not long after he made a drastic shift into fine art.
“I grew up in Pinedale, Wyoming, and schools there didn’t even offer art classes, but I always had an interest. Later I went to the University of Wyoming and minored in art, majored in mathematics. From there I went into computers because I never thought it would be possible to be a professional artist. So I was a computer programmer and systems analyst for eight years,” Smith says from his studio. “At the time my wife, Jean, and I were both 31 years old and I had decided I wanted to be a professional artist. We were [so] young that we thought we were bulletproof. That was back in 1971. I wasn’t ready, but, of course, I didn’t know that.”
After being picked up by galleries in Montana and Colorado, Smith had to evaluate what he wanted out of his career due to the way he worked in the studio. Paintings came when they were ready, and work couldn’t be rushed. “Both of my galleries were instrumental in starting my career, but I was never prolific so I decided early on the best route for me to take would be to get into major shows. I just couldn’t give a gallery enough to make it worth promoting me,” he says. And the plan worked out. Over
the decades he’s shown work and won awards at the Prix de West and Masters of the American West, and his work is in the collections of the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Autry Museum of the American West, the Montana
State Historical Museum and the Denver Art Museum. “I was always thankful to just make a living doing this thing I love. The first year I made $3,000. I had nowhere to go but up.”
On his path to the top, Smith encountered a number of the great Western artists along the way. Artists such as Bettina Steinke, Conrad Schwiering, James Reynolds and Wilson Hurley, who took the younger artist under his wing. “Wilson was a genius in many fields. A real renaissance guy. He went to West Point and his father was the undersecretary of war for [Herbert] Hoover and then some military cabinet position for [Franklin D.] Roosevelt. Wilson was a pilot, an attorney, a banker and, most of all, an artist,” Smith says. “He had me come down to Albuquerque to see how he was doing these huge murals for the [National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum]. They were so big that he had them on a scroll because there was no way to get up and down that high to paint them. He was also an engineer, because he had mounted the paintings on these aluminum stretchers that would expand at the same rate as the canvas, so whether it was warm or cold, there was no sagging or tightening of the canvas. Those are the kind of artists that are the most interesting to me.”
Many of Smith’s friends and colleagues would join him later on his Wind River trips. Aspevig was an early member in the group
and recalls many great experiences on these adventures into nature. The two even spent some time looking for the original locations of some of Rungius’ old field studies—and found most of them still undisturbed from the time of Rungius. “I first met Tucker in the late 1970s, and later we started exploring around near Pinedale, which is in his neck of the woods. We both love that country. Our first major trip was in the late 1980s, and we went numerous times in groups, and just the two of us. We saw some rough trails up there, but we always made it out. I can remember one time up on a mountain the lightning sounded like it was striking all around us. I was sure we would get hit but never did,” Aspevig says. He recalls a Vietnam vet who was their guide and who traveled with plenty of whiskey, once tore a cast away from his broken wrist because it itched too much and chased a bear out of camp with a frying pan. “It was a fun time. Of course, we were in better shape in those days and we’d be riding up above 10,000 feet and hauling all our gear. We’d also paint all day, which was always nice.”
As to why Smith’s work has become so treasured by collectors and respected by fellow artists, Aspevig says the artist is dedicated to his subject matter. “We would be hiking or riding and he would just get giddy when he was looking at the color out in nature. He just has a passion for looking really deep into things,” Aspevig says. “When we would paint he would take his time on one painting. He wouldn’t even necessarily finish it, but he would get that accurate keyed-in color. He could look at something and really see the color and texture, the light effects, the composition. He had an incredible discipline to go way beyond a photograph, to take his work to the next level.”
It’s that dedication, that complete surrender to his subject matter, that will be on view at A Celebration of Nature in Jackson Hole. The traveling retrospective will feature around 80 pieces, including new work painted for the exhibition. Notable works include the Autry’s Wyoming Sky, which won the Masters of the American West purchase award in 2009; the 120-inch-wide panoramic The Refuge, commissioned by the National Museum of Wildlife Art in 1994; and several works that show how Smith deviated outside of wildlife art, including The Auction, a work from 1987 that shows a farm auction with dozens of figures.
“Tucker has had an influential presence at the museum here in Jackson. After Carl Rungius, Tucker probably has the most paintings in the collection. His work is just so incredibly meticulous. Generations of artists have been influenced by his work,” says the museum’s associate curator of art, Tammi Hanawalt. “One of the things that really impresses me about him is his generosity with his time. He so frequently takes other artists out with him. He’s a patient teacher, and it’s inspiring.”
For Tucker, the process of bringing these works together for a retrospective was difficult but also therapeutic. “The paintings I did early in my career, those ones I have less personal connection to, so I don’t remember their problems or process. I could look at them more objectively than my fresh stuff. And that was interesting to me. It was like I was looking at someone else’s work,” he says. “It’s been fun to forget them and then see them again after all these years.”
He continues: “When you’re a painter, everything is a learning process. All I ever wanted to do was do the next painting better than the previous one. And that’s something that’s not really achievable. The painting in your head is always better than the painting on the canvas. I heard a quote from Rungius that really stuck with me. Basically, he wanted to paint like Sargent and Sorolla, but he had to learn to live with his limitations. Now, I think he made a pretty good Carl, but there he was wanting to paint like someone else. That really grounded me. No matter what you’re doing, something can always be done better.”
Tucker Smith: A Celebration of Nature is scheduled to open May 23 at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. When the show concludes on August 23 it will travel to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, National Sporting Library and Museum, C.M. Russell Museum and Booth Western Art Museum.
National Museum of Wildlife Art, 2820 Rungius Road, Jackson, WY 83002 (307) 733-5771, www.wildlifeart.org