From being pinned behind a tree by a bull elk to his bodybuilding debut to designing the federal duck stamp, artist Daniel Smith has lived a life full of adventure and creation.

As early as grade school, Daniel Smith was considered the artist in his class. A Minnesota native, he spent ample time exploring the outdoors, oftentimes on horseback. 

When he got to high school, his art teacher told him that if he wanted to be a professional artist, he would either have to spend an inordinate amount of his time at art fairs or become a potter.

“I thought, ‘Well, that’s lame. I don't want to do that,’” Smith said. “I ultimately ended up in a vocational commercial art course.”

During the two-year program, he started working as a designer and illustrator for a local company. After a few years in the field, he decided that it was time to move on as computers began to become a bigger and bigger part of commercial art. 

“At the age of 25, I just decided, ‘Hey, you know, maybe I should try my hand at doing some more fine art,’” he said. “Wildlife was always of interest.”

Right around the same time, something else captured his attention. As is often the case with desk-based jobs, Smith noticed that he was not as active as he wanted to be. To mediate that, he borrowed his brother’s bicycle and started lifting weights for exercise.

“Within a couple of years, I put on a bunch of muscle, and I thought that was pretty cool,” he said. “I got really serious about it for a while.”

With his training, nutrition and recovery dialed in, he decided to enter his first bodybuilding show. Getting down from 215 pounds to a very lean 170, he placed third in his weight class. In his second competition, he took first place in his weight class, becoming the middleweight Mr. Minnesota.

After his second competition, he knew he was not able to devote the time and effort necessary for bodybuilding and shifted his focus more towards wildlife art.

Bridging the gap between commercial art and wildlife fine art, Smith tried his hand at designing the Federal Duck Stamp. His first entry in 1980 earned him second place. By 1983, he came out on top in a state competition.

“That generated a fair amount of money – more than we thought was going to come in,” he said. “And that enabled me to walk away from commercial art and go more into fine art.”

Most of the proceeds of the Federal Duck Stamp went towards conservation efforts. The money for the stamp artists mainly came from reproductions. In 1986, he won the federal competition.

“I did 30 plus different stamps in that era,” he said. “I kind of called myself a duck stamp mercenary. They were hiring me to do some and some of them were contests, but I was one of the go-to people.”

Wanting to expand beyond the duck stamps, Smith ventured into the print market, working with the renowned Mill Pond Press among many other esteemed wildlife painters. Slowly, he began moving away from prints and towards mainly original pieces.

For his paintings, Smith only uses reference photographs that he took himself.

“The thing for me has always been to live among my subjects as much as possible – just being on the field trips, doing the research, getting enough photos,” he said.

Getting those photographs provided some challenges, though. Reference trips have taken Smith all over the world. Over the years he has made seven trips to Africa, at least a dozen to Alaska and many others across the globe. His most recent trip was to Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

More often than not, getting the reference photographs he wants means getting off the beaten path. While he does not do quite as much hiking as he used to, sometimes the subject calls for it.

“There’s some subjects like mountain goats,” he said. “Now they're not going to come to you. You’ve got to go to them. They're always on the side of the mountain somewhere.”

When in the studio, Smith takes that experience of being out there in the wild – the sound, the smell, the feeling – and translates it to the canvas. While all the animals are ones he photographed himself, he takes some liberty with the background to better convey the essence of the experience that a camera cannot capture.

“One of my objectives usually is to have a really strong focal point I need to create, and it depends on my reference and what I'm trying to do,” he said. “A lot of times, especially with some of those small or medium sized paintings, I do what I refer to kind of as a theatrical background. The focal point remains really strong. It just doesn't compete with the subject matter with the way I like to portray it, so I'm using mist, I’m using light and shadow in ways to kind of suggest an environment and give it a time and a place.”

While much inspiration has come from far away places, plenty more has stemmed from just beyond Smith’s backyard. For more than two decades, he lived in Bozeman, Montana, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. Currently, he and his wife, Liz, reside on 23 remote acres near Glacier National Park. There, they have seen grizzly bears, black bears, mountain lions, the occasional moose and more passing through.

Looking back on the span of his career, Smith is grateful for all the opportunities that came up in his life and the ability to make art his career.

“It's just something I do and I enjoy doing,” he said. “I've been gifted and I've been able to make a living at it. It's been a phenomenal lifestyle for me – the privilege of being able to live where I do and not be restricted, being able to do what I do wherever I could.”

-Griffin Salkowski

Available works by Daniel Smith