Bradley Foster Smith

I am a wandering vagabond artist. I was born the day after Iran released the American hostages 26 years ago in the suburbs of Detroit. I grew up in the mountains of northeastern Tennessee, where my blood runs deep. I've taught myself most of what I know, and what I haven't I've learned from careful observation. After I graduated high school, I took off to Iowa to detassle corn for a month. There I discovered the mystery of songs' lives: watching a fellow migrant playing guitar around the campfire, singing Bob Dylan songs. I attended my first year of college at The University of Memphis (at the opposite end of the state) where I studied Theatre, then transferred to Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts where I studied filmmaking. It was very lonely for me there the first couple of years. A breakthrough came when I got the opportunity to take summer classes in Prague. I discovered I was not a complete misanthrope; that I was a likeable person (2 years of near isolation will tear at a man's confidence). I was bolstered by the Old World (and the absinthe) and after classes were over I traveled to Vienna, and then to Bern, Switzerland to visit a museum full of Paul Klee paintings. I returned to America a new man, and my final year of college I acted with several improv/comedy troupes and drew political cartoons for the school newspaper (at the time, you recall, the country was lurching obediently towards War in Iraq, which I thought was a bad idea for reasons that are, by now, fairly obvious -- thus, great cartoon material). I received an award for comedy at the 2003 Evvy Awards, and struck out West for Los Angeles. Along the way, I took a detour in Arizona where I (without the use of drugs) recieved a vision: In the painted desert --a double sunset like something out of Blake -- one fiery sun to the west, and its reflection against distant stormclouds to the east -- I pulled my car over and got out to take pictures, but a voice told me that I wasn't here for pictures, and I let my head draw back and found myself breathing with the sky -- my breath syncronous with the ebb and flow of wispy clouds overhead. I felt so moved by the experience, and so the next morning I drove back to that spot and discovered, not two hundred feet away, a giant black boulder covered with petroglyphs: hundreds of symbols and doodles left by an ancient Indian tribe, scratched white into the black rock. I decided to interpret this series of events as sufficient proof that the cosmos approved of my vocation as an artist. I am old-fashioned in that way. That was probably the high point of my trip out west: in L.A. I soon found myself homeless, and not long after that my car was totaled by a hit&run driver. I was a weary, bedraggled, off-kilter young man by that point, and decided to limp home to Johnson City, Tennessee -- the home I'd run away from so many years ago. I planned to save up money and return to California, but, as Mr. Lennon observed, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans). Instead I found myself swept into a golden era of true bohemianism, southern-style. I made many dear friends and grew a lot. I started performing music in public. I published a series of indy comic books called Boom Comix with a buddy. I painted a mural for my surrogate family of poets, hippies, barflies, musicians, and outlaws at a bar called the Acoustic Coffeehouse. And I eventually hooked up with the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, where I toured around schools, playing a bunch of different characters. As I write this, I am up in Detroit (where I was born -- full circle, eh?), painting a mural in an elementary school. Soon I will be travelling around the West and East Coast with an accordion, a typewriter, a sketchpad, a headful of dreams and a heartful of ... well ... blood. In short, LIVING THE DREAM as best I can, and if you believe in LIVING THE DREAM, then I raise a glass to you -- *clink* -- Prost!