Floridian: Getting his licks in

[Art: Steve Smith]

GULFPORT -- What's with the shoes? Up there, dangling from the telephone wires? Drive far enough and you'll see weather-worn high-tops blowing in the wind. Like jaybirds they come with the scenery.

Who throws shoes over telephone wires? Punky kids? Slobs who enjoy torturing telephone linemen? Has Christo run out of pink plastic?

Serious questions the artist Steve Smith had. He lives in Pinellas County, in Gulfport, a little Bohemia where citizens sometimes express themselves by catapulting footware over GTE property.

He caught nobody in the act. So he asked around. Someone said: Shoe-tossing must be a gang thing. Another suggested: It's territorial, like carving your name on a tree. The presence of shoes proves the thrower is alive.

"Having delved deeply into this complex question," Smith says now, "we were able to debunk the popular belief that these shoes are caught on power lines as they rain down like manna from heaven."

He took out his paint brushes and made a picture. In fact, he painted 20 little canvasses dressed up by 19 shoes -- fancy boots to natty high-heeled sneakers -- hanging from telephone wires.

"Fine art meets Metaphysics meets Sociology meets Cosmic Consciousness," he told people.

Next, inevitably, came the stamps. He calls them Soles in Limbo, but don't look for them at the post office.

The front of the caribou is the work of the U.S. Postal Service, the back end is the work of Mr. Smith.
[Art: Steve Smith]

Smith can't grow a decent ponytail any more. At 50, he's losing his hair, for cripes sake. One of these days, maybe even this year, he's going to create a stamp dedicated to hairless men. The U.S. Postal Service plans releasing a stamp, featuring Malcolm X, as a way to celebrate "Black Heritage." Smith's knockoff, bearing his own likeness, will celebrate "Bald Heritage."

For decades, more for his own pleasure than bank account, he has designed stamps that on first glance look like postal-service issues. But up close, yowza.

Stamps that mimic the federal government's "Endangered Species" series, for example, turn out to be Smith's "Endangered Feces" collection. He shows the back ends of the animals, and what comes out their back ends.

Like writers and cartoonists he admires -- think Carl Hiaasen and R.C. Crumb -- he remains unapologetically subversive. Not to mention a wee scatological.

Gulfport artist Steve Smith is a master of parody.
[Times photo: Bill Serne]

He has never simply marched to a different drummer. He has jitterbugged.

In second grade, he got into trouble for painting pornographic pictures. Anyway, that's what the teacher saw. Smith's version: They were drawings of naked people inspired by what he'd seen in art books.

Like other kids, he built model cars. They weren't realistic enough for him. He used a jeweler's saw to cut doors that really opened. He built tiny key chains and glued keys to little ignition locks.

At Eckerd College, he slept on a mattress on the floor and drove a VW bus. He read Allen Ginsberg poetry, listened to Bob Dylan and disliked Tricky Dicky. A conscientious objector, he served his country two years in a hospital during the Vietnam War.

Afterward he painted billboards. He painted a grand mural on a building in Clearwater (now gone). He painted a mural, a collage of giant Florida postcards, that graces St. Petersburg's main library to this day.

His grandmother offered to send him to law school. She would have been better off suggesting he go to Pluto. He convinced her he was more suited for a master's degree in art from the University of Florida.

He has taught at Eckerd, at the University of Tampa and has given private lessons. He has painted a lot of pictures, developed a local following, made a little money, struggled, struggled even more, had fun, maybe too much fun, for he has never once -- not even for a nanosecond -- considered cutting off his ear.

Smith probably could coax a chortle out of that notorious, one-earred sourpuss, van Gogh. "I'm out to have fun," Smith says. "And I can't have fun if I'm not making things almost every day."

"I don't separate art from everything else I do in my life," he tells people. Let's say his cat needs an elevated box on which to perch. He builds a box with back legs inspired by a feline's muscular rear haunches.

"The artifact itself is no big deal, but the act of living a life of art is what I'm about."

He and his wife, Ellen Manning, throw Halloween parties. Smith takes costumes seriously. One year he masqueraded as a shriner. His intricate wardrobe included a funny car -- attached to his waist. Another time he cut off his ponytail, bought himself a three-piece suit and replaced his wire-rim glasses with tortoise shells.

Above his sink is a Roadside Kill Cookbook. It's mostly for laughs; yet he has lived in Florida long enough to know that for wildlife, highways are as dangerous as developers.

A few years ago, the postal service released a Florida stamp featuring, of course, an alligator. Smith designed a stamp that looked identical . . . except for the tire in the corner rolling over the alligator's tale.

The idea for the stamps happened two decades ago when Smith was addressing an envelope. First he spruced up the address with a drawing. Then he copied and modified the legal stamp stuck on the envelope. Soon he was making sheets of faux stamps. Now they star in art shows, including a few in unusual places.

The main U.S. Post Office in St. Petersburg, for example. The postmaster invited him to display his work. There's nothing illegal about his art, though some post office employees wish he'd make his stamps a tad larger. Otherwise, they look too much like the real thing.

At least at first. And sometimes not even then. On the 1995 day the federal government issued stamps honoring Richard Nixon and Marilyn Monroe, Smith released his "Marilyn Nixon" stamp. Imagine the former President as a drag queen. An equal opportunity offender, Smith created a stamp portraying Bill Clinton as the Wolfman long before Monica Lewinsky became a household name.

Smith sells a series of stamps for $20. A year's worth -- six issues -- costs $100. They are available through the internet at http://www.artgonepostal.com or by writing Smith at P.O. Box 5172 Gulfport, FL 33737.

"I've only been in trouble once," he says. It was because of his "Georgia O'Keeffe" stamp. O'Keeffe was an artist who painted pictures of the reproductive organs of beautiful flowers. Smith's stamp, which looked like an O'Keeffe flower, celebrated a human female form.

Steve Smith bares his soles in a painting that draws its inspiration from the footwear he’s seen hanging from electric wires.
[Times photo: Bill Serne]

Smith believes in field work. When he was working on his Soles in Limbo series he wanted to display more than moldy tennis shoes. For inspiration, his travels brought him to Gulfport's Shoe Liquidator. It's a dusty little store with bargain shoes aplenty. When Smith asked to photograph shoes, the white-haired owner could barely drag his eyes away from the television.

He and his wife drive to Shoe Liquidator. The white-haired owner is watching a talk show on an ancient television. Unsmiling, more grunting than talking, the white-haired man says he doesn't remember Smith. The artist cheerfully hands him the Soles in Limbo collection anyway.

[Art: Steve Smith]

"For God's sake," the white-haired man says. A broad smile creeps over his face. Next thing he's telling Smith his life history, about days back in old Miami when he lived next to a house of ill-repute name of Rosie's Tea Room. The shoe monger also brags about his fine stock of footware.

Smith looks around. He buys a pair -- weirdish slip-on sneakers. They look perfect for marching to the beat of another drummer. Or jitterbugging.

Steve Smith creates mini-masterpieces that undercut the expectations some viewers bring to art. Does the Postal Service know how funny he is?