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LOGAN NEILLDarrell Smith's painstaking research and dedication to fine detail can be seen in every one of his paintings.
BROOKSVILLE - Although Darrell Smith says he doesn't become attached to his creations, he confesses some affinity for his painting of an immature bald eagle.
The work, which currently hangs in the City Hall Art Gallery among about 40 other of Smith's wild bird paintings, contains something that seems to always catch the artist's eye.
"The feathers," says Smith. "I think the feathers turned out particularly well - the detail and texture. I'm not a critic of my own work, but this one has a certain appeal to me as an artist."
To appreciate Smith's dedication to fine detail is to understand the painstaking effort that goes into every one of his creations.
His in-depth research includes observing things like bird movements and mating rituals, as well as studying the delicate preserved skins to note the subtle hues he will render on canvas. Smith says his role as an artist is to fine-tune the way we look at winged creatures.
"I love a challenge," said the 70-year-old Brooksville resident, who is the focus of the gallery's winter art exhibit. "Painting birds fascinates me because you have so much color and contrast to deal with. Everything you do has to be right on the money to make the picture believable."
Smith estimates he has painted between three and four thousand birds in his 50-odd years as an artist. He paints both majestic species, such as red-shouldered hawks, ospreys and eagles, as well as the often overlooked varieties of finches, sparrows and flycatchers.
Smith, who works exclusively with egg emulsion tempera paints, prefers to capture his subjects in life size, which he believes produces a unique synergy of spirit and reality, not often found in wildlife art.
"A lot of bird painters will focus on just painting the creatures, while all but ignoring the surrounding elements of the picture," said Smith.
In Smith's works, twigs and leaves are rendered with their flaws. Backgrounds depict shadows and light indicative of certain times of the day.
Much of what Smith learned about painting birds came from his days growing up in Clarksville, Tenn. In the fields and meadows near his boyhood home, he would sketch the everyday doings of the creatures as they hunted food and raised their young. However, Smith knew that an art education would have to come from someplace other than his small town.
He joined the Merchant Marines after high school. Later he moved to the East Coast to study art in New York's Cooper Union college and at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn. Not long afterward he met Carroll Jones, a commercial wildlife artist who would become Smith's mentor.
"He inspired me to look beyond the obvious as an artist, and to look for something not being said in a painting that needs to be said," said Smith.
Throughout the 1960s, Smith did just that. He was hired as an touring artist with Decor, a wildlife magazine. And he slowly built a reputation as a fine art painter whose work has been exhibited at the Gallery of Natural History Washington's Smithsonian Museum, as well as the Cornell University Art Gallery.
After he moved to Brooksville in 1984, Smith began a regimen of painting that has been pretty much nonstop. In fact, he says, the overwhelming urge to paint proved to be detrimental to his health. A while back he took on a part-time job bagging groceries at Winn-Dixie just to get some exercise.
"That's the way I am," says Smith. "I get so involved in my work I'm probably liable to never leave."
Logan Neill can be reached at 352 848-1435 or lneill@sptimes.com