Clara Smith: Western Artist

As a child, artist Clara Smith lived a city life in Portland, Oregon during the school year. Come summertime, though, she lived in the country, on a chunk of land outside Bend with her aunt.

Clara’s aunt Joelle Smith was a horse lover. She kept several, and in the summer mornings, she taught Clara to ride and care for them. In the evenings, Clara would watch Joelle paint portraits of horses and ranching life in her studio. For Joelle, the horses and the lifestyle came first, then the art.

She taught Clara that, too. Soon, in school, Clara became “that girl in your class who was always drawing horses,” she says. She doodled them on her homework. She sketched them in books.

Joelle passed away in 2005. Her mother, Clara’s grandmother, continued to show Joelle’s work, and Clara went with her to shows to help out. In high school, an art teacher pushed Clara out of the comfort zone of pencil into painting: watercolor, then acrylic. Clara started bringing her own paintings to add to those shows, and then slowly took over running the shows from her grandmother.

Now Clara is a well-known Western artist. She lives in her aunt’s house outside Bend, and has two horses of her own. “I wouldn’t call myself a cowgirl and don’t do that as an occupation, but I have major respect for those who do,” she says.

“I depict the stories of people who actually have that lifestyle, the culture that’s behind it. A lot of it—the gear, the clothes—is built upon traditions that have been passed down. It’s a very welcoming culture to those who truly appreciate it and take the time to learn about it.”

Originally Clara’s style was similar to her aunt’s—it’s normal to mimic as you’re learning, she says—but she’s since developed more of her own style. She’s also a graphic designer, and that look crosses over into her paintings that often blend illustrations with digital applications. She still sketches all of her work first.

Her paintings show the buckaroo and vaquero styles of horsemanship typical of the Great Basin lands of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada, versus the Texas cowpuncher style. She doesn’t paint vintage scenes, but modern life: real people, real horses, in real places. And because Bend isn’t much of an agricultural town, she travels to ranches and rodeos for inspiration.

She often takes photos to make sure she gets all the elements of a painting just right. Some of that comes from the old artists she admires, like Charlie Russell and Will James. “You get this sense that they lived the western life. There’s such great storytelling through their work, you can start to imagine what they lived through in their accuracy and detail.”

She sees painting as a way of recording history. “So I get really particular about the details, and making sure everything is accurate, like the cinches, the reins, the horses. Being around Western art, you can start to tell who’s actually been around a horse, in how the anatomy and reactions and emotions are captured.”

To get in the mood to paint, Clara will often put on old western music—”Marty Robbins, Don Edwards, Eddie Arnold, those kinds of guys”—and channel that tradition into her work. And it all happens in her aunt’s old house, where Clara learned as a girl in the summer to love horses and making art.

Clara Smith, @claracarrera + clarasmithart.com