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S2 / E1 - Jeffrey Smith - The Art of Anything
31 Plays3 months ago
Host: Jess Villegas, ACUITY Business Consulting
In this episode we will explore how people actually grow into their work. Not through ambition alone or credentials, but through a sustained relationship with curiosity.
My guest today, Jeffrey Smith, is an Editorial Illustrator, who has spent more than four decades revealing what most of us overlook — the quiet structures beneath our emotions, the balance between discipline and wonder, and the small human gestures that make a scene come alive. His work has graced the covers of Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine, and his portraits and narrative-illustrations have illuminated subjects as varied as presidential politics, the 9/11 heroes, and the hidden corners of everyday life. Our discussion will include:
- The essence of emergence as something larger, wiser, and more coherent coming to life through small, imperfect steps. Most of us want coherence first. But more often, coherence is something we receive only after we’ve already begun.
- The power of leverage, where small shifts can produce outsized effects. One of the least discussed forms of leverage is where we place our attention over time. Attention shapes what we notice. What we notice shapes how we interpret. Interpretation shapes decisions. Decisions, repeated, become outcomes. That chain is always running, whether we acknowledge it or not.
A Note on the Podcast: Season 1 of The Leader’s Commute Podcast® was produced in partnership with Business RadioX and explored the early foundations of these ideas. If you're new here, you don't need to catch up on anything to begin. This season stands on its own. However, if you are interested in those episodes, you can access those here: The Leader’s Commute Podcast Archives - Business RadioX ®
If this episode resonated with you, please subscribe, consider sharing it with someone whose commute might benefit from a different way of seeing.
Jeffrey Smith Links: Jeffrey Smith, Illustrator Jeffrey Smith - Instagram Jeffrey Smith - Gallery
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Transcript
The Art of Anything: Leadership and Commutes
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to Leaders Commute podcast. I'm Justin Yegas. Today's episode is titled The Art of Anything. The Leaders Commute podcast explores how experiences that persistently resurface over the commute of our lives inform our worldview for how we lead others and ourselves.
Jeffrey Smith's Illustrious Career
00:00:25
Speaker
My guest today, Jeffrey Smith, is an editorial illustrator who has spent more than four decades revealing what most of us overlook, the quiet structures beneath our emotions, the balance between discipline and wonder, and the small human gestures that make a scene come alive.
00:00:41
Speaker
His work has graced the covers of Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine, and his portraits and narrative illustrations have illuminated subjects as varied as presidential politics, the 9-11 heroes, and the hidden corners of everyday life.
00:00:59
Speaker
Beyond the commissions, Jeffrey has also left the lasting mark on generations of artists through his teachings at the Art Center College of his Design, the School of Visual Arts, and other institutions.
00:01:11
Speaker
He calls his own career a quixotic journey, one driven more by idealism and storytelling than by convention. Jeffrey and I first crossed paths years ago in a Catholic high school in Southern California.
00:01:25
Speaker
Two kids trying to make sense of a world bigger than us. He was already sketching everything in sight while I was scribbling out story arcs, both of us unknowingly building the foundations of how we later see the world.
Personal Stories of Growth and Curiosity
00:01:39
Speaker
Off mic, I shared with Jeffrey a story from a previous podcast episode titled The Russian Junkman. It's about a high school job I took with a scrap and metal hauler, a man named Mr. Bilgey, and how what began as grind to build some summer cash turned into an unexpected apprenticeship in perception.
00:01:59
Speaker
At first, all I saw was junk, dented fenders, broken doors, twisted frames baking in the California heat. But as the week went on, I realized there was a purpose to the work and a composition to the chaos.
00:02:14
Speaker
That even discarded metal had form, rhythm, and pattern, if you look closely at it. What started as frustration became observation. What started as labor became art.
00:02:27
Speaker
This was my entry point for engaging Jeffrey. There's a particular kind of conversation that doesn't announce its importance right away. It doesn't come in with a thesis or try to prove anything.
00:02:39
Speaker
It unfolds slowly through curiosity, restraint, and attention. At first, I thought we were going to explore craft through an exploration of experiences, process, and perhaps even mastery.
00:02:51
Speaker
What emerged instead was something quieter and more demanding. This was a conversation about how people actually grow into their work. not through ambition alone or credentials, but through a sustained relationship with curiosity.
00:03:06
Speaker
In leadership, especially leadership without formal authority, we often assume that clarity comes first and action follows. But what if it's the other way around?
00:03:17
Speaker
What if attention comes first and meaning only shows up later? As you listen to this conversation, I'd invite you to listen for it isn't being forced. Notice the absence of performance, the absence of certainty.
00:03:31
Speaker
This episode isn't about becoming an expert in something. It's about learning how to stay in relationship with the work long enough for it to shape you. Please enjoy, and thank you for listening.
Jeffrey Smith's Life-Changing Moments
00:04:00
Speaker
Welcome Jeffrey. How you doing? I'm doing great, Jess. Thank you. I really appreciate you being here and I'm really looking forward to having some conversation with you. I'm with you and I'm looking forward to it as well. Thank you. All right. Maybe just get us started.
00:04:15
Speaker
I have an opportunity to look at a lot of your experiences and the book that you're working on and all very informative. So I guess the way i like to start Jeff is one of the things that really stuck with me and I'm sorry if I misspeak on some of the chronology of things, but I do recall that your father had passed away very close to graduation. And I knew it was close to graduation. I didn't know how long because I knew that at graduation, you were acknowledged by the powers of the the school there about the circumstance.
00:04:43
Speaker
Because you called it out, I think the word you used is that your father's death shocked you, but it also liberated you from the psychological bonds of confusion and self-doubt. And this was coming on the heels of you starting to wonder if you could make a living doing the kind of work you wanted to do.
00:04:58
Speaker
But I do remember that when that acknowledgement was made, and I had all of the normal things any 17-year-old feel. I knew he was a really nice guy, and it was just painful for everybody.
00:05:09
Speaker
But I also remember thinking, i wonder... how Jeff's doing, I wonder what it really means for him at this moment. Knowing that you liked art, but not necessarily knowing what your aspirations were, it informed you and it informed me when it happened and informs me now even more because now I can see what it did for you and I'm fascinated. So anyway, I'm going to move off of that, Jeff, and I just had to voice that because I just thought that maybe you might appreciate to that point of view. guess I'm going open it up and let you just respond to anything you like there.
00:05:40
Speaker
Your stories about the Russian fellow reminded me of my adolescence and what I was doing was stripping wire. My father was an electrician and particularly I think in the summers,
00:05:56
Speaker
He and my mother were separated and he had a house over on Grape Street in the El Jardin in Pico Rivera. And we would go over there and do things like strip wire.
00:06:06
Speaker
And then he would take that wire to a reclamation center and to get cash. We used a hook knife, tied one end of the wire to a chain-link fence, and then walked backwards, stripping the insulation off the wire.
00:06:21
Speaker
I think that's the equivalent of your story about the Russian gentleman that taught you so much through simple tasks at work. Maybe what I learned was don't be in a hurry.
00:06:32
Speaker
I cut my hands up pretty good with that hook blade. And at one point I was asked i was told to mow the lawn at my father's house and maneuvering around big ah wheels of wire laying in the lawn.
00:06:49
Speaker
I think it must've been a dewy summer day. I stepped to the side of the lawnmower and pushed the lawnmower and my foot slipped into where the grass ejects from the lawnmower and I cut up my toes.
00:07:03
Speaker
yeah good Good thing that lawnmower's blade was pretty dull, but I still had to go to the hospital and get my foot fixed. So that, That precipitated me going to Disneyland with my girlfriend at the time, hobbling around on crutches, and it made getting in the Haunted Mansion with her a little more difficult than she'd been. You walked around the Haunted Mansion limping like you were one of the characters, probably.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes. That's the connectivity we're talking about, Jeff. Yeah, you bet it is. Jeff, if you wouldn't mind, just if you could talk a little bit about the lead up to that point in time at graduation, you'd said that you were thinking about what the path might be for you to apply your craft and it wasn't all coming into focus yet. I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, i I've written a lot about it. there's ah There's many things to say. It's hard to find the right words, but I think I would describe me as I had a very fierce kind of relationship with my reputation as an artist. I wanted to be the artist and I was very productive in grade school.
00:08:07
Speaker
I would draw for the nuns, maybe nativity scenes in the classroom. There were a thing when we were kids, I don't know if you remember weirdo cards, but I remember copying, drawing weirdo cards for my classmates and just so many things. I was just busy all the time drawing and I was obsessive about it And it really helped me escape from a lot of unhappiness in my adolescence and childhood.
00:08:30
Speaker
My father died two weeks before we graduated from high school. And it was a shocker. It shouldn't have been really, but it was. Of course, I was heartbroken and I was angry at the just how sudden that the impact of that was and that I had lost a hero, a very s flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless.
00:08:52
Speaker
He knew i was artistic and he did his best to say to me that He appreciated it and he respected it.
00:09:03
Speaker
I brought him to tears. I did a wood carving of the Anheuser-Busch logo, the Eagle in the A, and he just almost broke down in tears looking at it. His idea was that I would go to work for my older brother, Patrick. He's 10 years older than I, and he's...
00:09:18
Speaker
He's a sign painter and he's a brilliant sign painter. And I knew that wasn't going to work. At very early age, I knew that wasn't going to work. I wasn't going to be a sign painter. I wasn't enamored with the art of lettering.
00:09:30
Speaker
I was obsessively drawing faces and figures and things like that. And my brother and I just didn't have the kind of chemistry that would allow for a future in business together. So how to become an artist, I had no idea.
00:09:47
Speaker
st Paul High School, the high school you and I attended together with our friends, was a college prep high school, if I recall. And I think it was more attenuated to kids who were looking to go into business, that sort of thing, right? but That's my general impression of it.
00:10:03
Speaker
And there were better angels there for me. Sister Celeste Marie Nutman was the art teacher. Tom Anthony was the drama teacher. And brother Peter Roddy was a film buff.
00:10:15
Speaker
and a teacher of probably many things. And then you and I both have talked about the the amazing brother, Kieran, who taught drafting at St. Paul High School and knew my brother 10 years prior to us being there.
00:10:29
Speaker
So there were better angels there in terms of what I wanted to do, but I just couldn't figure me out. I was hung up on this sort of respect respect in my, what it meant to me was I couldn't really be an artist because my brother was the artist. And so I didn't want to really step on his parade and i just didn't really know what to do. So when my father died, after I got over the grief and shock and everything like that, I realized it was just, look, you're gonna, your life isn't gonna be that long.
00:11:03
Speaker
Even if you live to be an old man, it's a very short ride. Let's get after it. No holds barred. Just come on. All bets are off now. I love my family, but I just got to go on my own path, no matter what anybody thinks.
00:11:18
Speaker
So I enrolled immediately at l a Trade Tech Technical College. earned an AA degree and on to Art Center and then to New York. And I just wouldn't let anything or anyone get in between me and the idea of being an artist. How I descended on New York was really many things, films about New York that I'm sure you enjoyed and I know I did.
00:11:42
Speaker
And the idea back in those days, if you wanted to be an editorial illustrator, once I got onto that mission, all of that was in New York. All the magazines were in the corner from New York to Boston, nothing in Los Angeles.
00:11:56
Speaker
And at the time that I decided to go to New York in illustration in Los Angeles, airbrush was king. There was a phenomenon around 1980 where all of the illustrators of Los Angeles were painting with an airbrush.
00:12:09
Speaker
Pretty cool stuff actually, but not my thing. so all of that just made it easy for me to make up my mind when I got the opportunity to go to New York and the ghost of my father has always been with me. To say that he doesn't, that I don't think of him every day would be just insincere and dishonest.
00:12:28
Speaker
He preached hard work. He preached commitment. He tried to teach us skills and I owe much to him. But in fact, I think I could not have pursued my career had he lived.
00:12:45
Speaker
I don't think I could have left Los Angeles. It just, it would be a matter of commitment. Isn't that interesting? There's lots of wisdom thinking around the idea that one thing happens and other things happen. And the Stoics say everything in life isn't good or bad. It's what you think about it.
00:12:59
Speaker
And a lot of it is just having the temperament to try and operate in an environment where everyone won't be pleased with what you want to do, and including yourself. and We all struggle. But I guess I would say this, for someone to the decide yourself,
00:13:12
Speaker
that young, okay, I'm going to do this. And it wouldn't matter what other people thought, not in a disrespectful way. You just realized that maybe it wouldn't be a popular thing or you weren't sure you should do it, but you did it anyway because you felt in your heart you needed to do it.
00:13:25
Speaker
I think that's a really enlightened point of view. And I think most people are struggling to get that throughout their whole lives.
Philosophical Reflections and Career Impact
00:13:31
Speaker
So do you think your decision at that time, did you just have a stroke of enlightenment or did you just, we're just young and naive and thought, I just have to do this now because if I don't,
00:13:41
Speaker
it It just, I have a fear of what it'll be if I don't do it. That's my word. Fear is my word. What is the word i'm looking for? A ah revelation that happened Infrequently. If they were frequent, they wouldn't be revelations, right? I mean, you know how something impactful happens and you look up into the corner of a dark room and suddenly the answer appears. Or I think the word I've used in the past, now that I'm thinking of it, is epiphany.
00:14:05
Speaker
I think that's a word used in the Catholic Church, by the way. But anyway, and revelations. I had an epiphany upon my father's death, which was... I don't like where I'm living. I don't like my life. I don't want to be here.
00:14:19
Speaker
ah can't stay here. I've got to go, whatever that meant. The thing that carried me was my obsession with drawing. And it defined everything that came in front of me as to whether they going to turn left or was I going to turn right or was I going to go straight ahead, which was if we're not talking about drawing,
00:14:40
Speaker
They get out of my way. I need to keep moving down the road to find the right person that's going to celebrate that with me. And so when I went to Los Angeles Trade Technical College, grade school, they were teaching people. At that time, it was called production art.
00:14:58
Speaker
You were cutting out film with typography on and pasting it onto a whiteboard. very technical. An extension of the Brother Kieran ideology, skill and precision and clarity.
00:15:12
Speaker
But I knew the minute that I stepped into that room, that it wasn't what I would be doing. It wasn't even an option. It wasn't even a possibility.
00:15:24
Speaker
However, I also knew i had stepped into an environment which required a lot of focus and a lot of attention to skill. to learn how to use a T-square, to learn how to use a steel triangle, to learn how to use mechanical pencils, to learn how to use rapidograph pens, to learn how to be neat, which I'm not.
00:15:47
Speaker
Like, I'm incapable of neatness. Brother Kieran would always remind me of my brother Patrick, who was incredibly gifted at that sort of thing. So anyway, when I stepped into LHA Tech, I knew it was a ah ah stepping stone to something else. Now, backing up just a little bit,
00:16:07
Speaker
Sister Celeste Marie Nutman, who was the art teacher at Art Center, sent me over to the Art Center College of Design, i don't know, in my junior year, I would guess, to check it out.
00:16:19
Speaker
She said, you need to see this place. It's highly, has a great reputation, and maybe it's something you should look at. So I went over there, and it was a very important moment.
00:16:31
Speaker
the What do you call her? The lady that you know shows people around um the school. and Her name was Florence Karachek. She was a very elegant lady. And she took me to the gallery at Art Center and I looked at the artwork and I thought, oh my God, ah this is so far beyond me.
00:16:47
Speaker
I simply know I can't do this. And she saw that in me and she said, hold on a second. let's Let me show you something else. So we went to a studio where the kids were drawing, which was just incredibly powerful. to Walk into a room for the first time and see kids on drawing benches standing, sitting around an art model who's posing for them.
00:17:10
Speaker
And they're drawing this was like, it was like, oh my God, this is where I need to be. And when I saw the drawings, I knew I could compete. I knew I could do that in my arrogant mind, knew I could do it better than most people, which it wasn't necessarily true, but you strive once you make that realization. So after my father died, i had that imprinted in my brain and I knew that's where I needed to go.
00:17:38
Speaker
LA Trade Tech, as fine a school as it was for so many people, was a stepping stone for me to get to the Art Center College of Design. That makes sense. so You were just trying to illustrate not only what your personal passion was in terms of what you wanted to do, but how that was animated by the situation at home with your dad. And maybe if you can not get past, that's not the right word, but if you can adapt to a life without having someone that you love around.
00:18:06
Speaker
by having that individual be there either directly or indirectly the catalyst for the next move. That's a really good way to not only honor your skill, but to also honor your father. Yeah, and no, absolutely in agreement. You've used the word story and storytelling.
00:18:20
Speaker
And my father was an electrician by trade, came from a very small town in Northern New Mexico, Pinasco. And he came from a family of five or six siblings, five, I think.
00:18:33
Speaker
And one of my aunts, his sister Lillian was a school teacher. So that got put in my brain, like, okay, school teachers, not sure I'm ever going to be capable of that, but maybe that's something I can look at somewhere down the road. My father, for his all his working class roots, he wore bib overalls, cowboy boots, and was a pretty, well,
00:18:59
Speaker
He was a character, but he read Steinbeck, Hemingway. He read the Bible. He read, he wasn't a churchgoer, but he read the parables and that sort of thing.
00:19:10
Speaker
He was aware of politics. He was a reader. And there were many times when I would sit in front of him and he would tell me stories. And his stories were right out of Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl, John Steinbeck, Hemingway, that sort of macho,
00:19:28
Speaker
yeah That macho thing and social realism and so many other things. Also, his church was AA. He was a sponsor in AA.
00:19:41
Speaker
And he that was his passion. That was the thing I think that he loved most of all. When I was 10 years old, I begged him to take me to an AA meeting. We talked about these things at dinner. He drank near beer and openly we discussed alcoholism.
00:19:55
Speaker
And so when I was 10, he finally acquiesced and he took me to an AA meeting. And it was a very strange experience because I saw faces there that just didn't seem right. and They didn't seem like the faces that I was accustomed to seeing. That was another kind of important experience. But I brought all this up just to say as a storyteller, my father was very passionate.
00:20:17
Speaker
And so when I got to LHA Tech, the little illustration assignments that we did, for instance, were to do a book cover. And I picked Steinbeck's Mice and Men. And those were my first attempts at illustrating literature.
00:20:31
Speaker
And my father, for sure, was a driving force. in that direction. There's many ways an illustrator can go. Many illustrators are not storytellers. They're technicians and they do advertising art, things like that. It's not about storytelling, right? Or not not directly, anyway.
00:20:50
Speaker
But I think those stories from my father were a driving force in the direction that I chose. Just to back us up just a little bit before we move off of some of this of the autobiographical stuff, if I may, just going back one more time to the circumstances of your dad's passing, and I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that in that circumstance, whatever your mental models were, whatever your paradigms were in that moment that he passed in conjunction with what was already internalized and institutionalized within your sort of environment,
00:21:22
Speaker
That event essentially released you to make the next move. And you pretty much said that you might not have been able to embark on the career had he he continued to live longer. And I don't know, does that sound like that's too much of a stretch to maybe characterize it in that respect?
00:21:36
Speaker
No, that's right on the money. That's right on the money. I can't imagine getting in a truck, a U-Haul truck and with 5,000 bucks in my pocket and driving to New York. In those days, there was no internet, no social media. The world was a much bigger place.
00:21:52
Speaker
So to go from Los Angeles to New York, and you all check at the age of 24 was it's remarkable. I think in a certain way, looking at that guy trying to understand, I i don't know about you, but I look back at my young self and I'm not quite sure. I was, that almost feels like another guy. It's looking at stranger in a way, or maybe it's just fun to do that, but yeah. i sometimes I'll do the same thing, Jeff.
00:22:16
Speaker
Mine's not quite as interesting, but the demarcation is pretty clean. I almost forget. anything I was or did or cared about other than basketball. I did like to play basketball. Oh, I recall. But there was B.L. and A.L.
00:22:29
Speaker
And B.L. was before Leslie, who now continues to be my wife of almost 50 years. Before her, I can't remember much of what I did. and i don't remember a lot of high school, to tell you the truth, because we were dating through most of high school.
00:22:41
Speaker
And then there was he after Leslie. ah So when I go back and think about all the problems and mistakes and things that I wish I'd done differently, And the things I'm proud of, they all happened after Leslie and I started connecting our lives together. But I do that because i try to be reflective. I think that's really the only way you can put anything in perspective.
00:22:59
Speaker
By definition, you can't even deduce patterns and contours without looking back and seeing what something was versus what it is now. I love it. i love it. just i what What's occurring to me right now as you're talking is, I think you would agree with this, but it's just how many people help you achieve what you're after all the way through grade school, high school, college, and the world and life in different places.
00:23:32
Speaker
This notion that people just go out and do things and take credit for it. There's so much help along the way and really nothing can get done without that help. I think. Yeah. I do remember I got married very young to Leslie. We were very young.
00:23:47
Speaker
And at the time I was still going to school and working as a school janitor, which paid pretty well at the time. But there I was a married guy at 20, working as a janitor, trying to go to school. I remember just joking around with my, with an uncle at a,
00:24:01
Speaker
picnic, family picnic. And he says to me, hey, Jess, how's, how are things going? i met Leslie. She's very nice. and And I wish you guys a long marriage. And he goes, so what are you going to do with your life? So I didn't know what to say. So was kidding him. says, I think I'd like to be the first janitor that gets a doctorate in philosophy.
00:24:17
Speaker
And I thought we'd have a good life and then I'd go get a hot dog. But he looks at me and he goes, no. I said, no. And he goes, no. And then he goes, you got a pretty wife there. You're going to have kids someday.
00:24:28
Speaker
So you're going to be an accounting clerk at one of our sign company divisions. Wow. I said, I don't know anything about accounting. And he said, that's okay. You'll figure it out. You're a smart guy. So I go and get the job and I have some tough moments, but I do figure it out.
00:24:43
Speaker
And over the next 10 years, while living Los Angeles, I realized I don't like accounting. Yeah. But I realized I did like having some money to to support my family. But all of that was just ah an uncle who just believed in me, didn't care. I didn't know accounting. All he knew is I would do the best I could and that I would be fine.
00:25:02
Speaker
And that was a huge amount of confidence. When your uncle asked you what you were going to do, did you say that you wanted to be a philosopher? for I said i i didn't know what I wanted to do, and I was supplementing some of my college courses with philosophy classes because I enjoyed them.
00:25:18
Speaker
Let me ask this. I think this is interesting. Would you agree that accounting is related to economics? Yes, because fundamentally, it's about keeping integrity in the information that you're trying to provide.
00:25:32
Speaker
I am, informally, student of economics. I really appreciate it. But there's a lot of philosophy in economics. A ton. In fact, one of the best books I've ever read was, i think it's called The Worldly Philosophers.
00:25:45
Speaker
And it's about all of McKenzie and all these guys, right? All these brilliant people in terms of economics. I know that the levels of accounting and economics, that's not exactly the same thing at all. But I was just wondering...
00:25:59
Speaker
Do you feel now, at this point in life, that you actually are a philosopher or that you've found philosophy in what you do? You know, it's interesting. that That's a really interesting question. I think everyone's a philosopher to some degree, but I do believe I've worked with it. I took a lot more philosophy classes than I should have, which really delayed my education because I just enjoyed it. And then that fostered lot of just learning in general.
00:26:23
Speaker
A lot of that plays into the evolution of my methodology, operating around the tenants of connectivity, of nonlinear thinking, of all these things that and we have to manage to to steer clear of so making everything so linear and making all the cause and effect being such a direct line.
00:26:43
Speaker
I started becoming fascinated with the idea of, for example, you can work at in a company and you if you create something and you make a lot of those things and you build a big inventory, because you want to have quick stuff that you can ship, except that maybe you produced it wrong six months ago, and you've six months sitting in your warehouse, and you don't even know what went wrong six months ago because it's been sitting there gathering dust until you shipped it. And a lot of people see that as a business problem, which it is.
00:27:10
Speaker
But I see that as a philosophical problem of of an adoption of an idea that disrespects the idea that if you're going to build things at high speed, You have to increase your quality control, not reduce it. And a lot of people think quality control is something to be eliminated the faster you go.
00:27:29
Speaker
But all these things are connected for me. And my uncle didn't know. He certainly didn't want me to become a philosophical janitor. But what he did tell me is he appreciated my thought process and that he was comfortable that I would figure out accounting because, well, it couldn't be hard the way I was operating.
00:27:46
Speaker
But it's an interesting question. And I also like to think... I'm a philosopher, at least at this level. but When I work with businesses, I figure they're good enough to already know the P's and Q's and all those things of running a business. Otherwise, they wouldn't be in a business.
00:28:01
Speaker
But what is their mindset doing? What are what is holding them back? What do they need to release? What do they need to receive in order to deliver within their operations and for their clients? And to me, that is mindset and velocity and constraints.
00:28:15
Speaker
I really want to talk a little bit more about the process, but you've produced so much product. I don't know how an artist quantifies that other than the number of things they've done, but could you just maybe encapsulate what's the volume of things you've created? It's very difficult to say just because there's the artwork that gets produced by way of process, like sketches, photography, the digital age photography.
00:28:42
Speaker
photo to comps, which are my way of composing a painting in photography before I paint it, then the paintings themselves, then the sort of storage of those paintings in digital formats as large and small files,
00:29:01
Speaker
And then there's the artwork that I produced while teaching, which is significant. And all of those things are, I've done a pretty good job of, of digitally recording all of that work and organizing it by year and clients.
00:29:22
Speaker
And i don't know, I think in excess of a couple thousand, 3000 pieces. What are the more significant sort of genres or specific works that you've done that could only have existed because you have such a an undergirding of experience and training and skills? What have they become in terms of how you look at your career?
00:29:42
Speaker
When I look back at my work as a student, the best of it, there's definitely a personality there all way up. Somebody that is not interested in selling things.
00:29:56
Speaker
for anybody. So work that would be appropriate for advertising clients or book covers even, oh was not interesting to me at all.
00:30:09
Speaker
I had made a declaration to Sister Celeste in high school that I was going to be an illustrator, and she was perplexed by that because she thought being an artist was a higher road. And she would send me into LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
00:30:27
Speaker
on a periodical basis of, I don't know, every ah read month or something. And I got some exposure to museums and I didn't care for museums. I'm not going to lie about that and say that I saw the blood on the walls. i It's not like that. i just It just felt clinical and detached to me.
00:30:47
Speaker
And I wasn't gifted enough or schooled enough to understand the art itself. I just didn't like the museum and just the little thing about that. So i I think I would say somewhere deep in my psyche, I was already influenced by the printed page, Mad Magazine, comic books, art like that.
00:31:10
Speaker
So that's that was my path. So when I started to get pretty good at things was when I arrived at Art Center and I couldn't see this at that time, but I can see it now.
00:31:24
Speaker
that the work I was making was really, i hope this isn't a bad thing to say, but it's an expression of my moods mixed with an attention to exterior or external subject matter.
00:31:37
Speaker
And i didn't still know what I could make of that, but I met the right people, thank God. And that sent me off to New York and probably the only place I could have made a living doing work for magazines. And at that time, magazines were running excerpts from fiction writers like Tennessee Williams and Joyce Carol Oates and John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway. And I got those assignments. So it was, wow, that's the lucky me. i came to a fork in the road.
00:32:09
Speaker
where I had to decide, did I want to be a narrative illustrator or did I want to be a conceptual meaning metaphorical illustrator?
00:32:20
Speaker
One who creates metaphors visually for things about business or things about medicine, et cetera. And there are people that are brilliant at that. I'm not one of them. And I made the decision that I needed to be a narrative illustrator. And the reason was I was better at it than the art director who was giving me the assignment.
00:32:39
Speaker
So if I was doing metaphorical illustration, the art director always thought they had the upper hand, that conceptually they were better than me. But if I was doing narrative illustration, they wouldn't acquiesce to my point of view because they weren't so sure about how to build a narrative image. And that was a pivotal point, another fork in the road.
00:32:57
Speaker
And that sort of had a major impact on the work that came out of me for the next 40 years. If you're working on a piece, how do you know if something's not quite working,
00:33:09
Speaker
even before you can name what it is. if you're working on something and it doesn't work, are you finding yourself with an easy process to get back on track or is it something that you have to let come to you or you got ruminate on it?
00:33:21
Speaker
What's happening when you get to that kind of a situation? I think that Art Center was very acclimated to applied arts and to illustration. And it was the right place for me to be. And I'm not criticizing it at all. It was a godsend. Okay.
00:33:34
Speaker
So in an art class, a teacher gives you an assignment. It's usually a pictorial problem. Create a painting using psychological color create a drawing using three-point perspective or create a portrait using watercolor, that sort of thing. It's a pictorial problem.
00:33:55
Speaker
The real world for me, once I drove to New York, got settled in and started learning by getting assignments and then meeting mentors who really helped me with this was it's a word image problem.
00:34:07
Speaker
So it's yeah the first step in the process is read the story. And I'm talking about the assignments that I cherish, the ones with the story.
00:34:18
Speaker
So Ricky Allred at the Hartford Turrent would send the story over. I would read the story by many times a pretty well-known writer.
00:34:29
Speaker
And then i would make sketches that I would present to the art director and they would say yes, no, yes, no, or whatever. I found that I had things to learn and I had a great mentor named James McMullen.
00:34:41
Speaker
He told me, he said, you've had some golden moments in illustration, but you're still learning how to read a story and understand what the illustration is. So all that to say that from art school to the street, there is the skill of reading a story and selecting the narrative moment that is essential, the thing that's going to appear on the printed page opposite the headline and the body of text that draws the viewer, and this is the idea, I think, that illustration should draw the viewer into the story and give them a dose of what the story is about without revealing too much about the resolution of the story in most cases.
00:35:26
Speaker
That skill took a number of years to get much better
Trusting Instincts and Narrative in Art
00:35:32
Speaker
at that. But the more you the more I did it, the better I got at it, I think.
00:35:37
Speaker
And that's really a question of trusting yourself. Like the essential idea of why that moment And the answer is because I like it. And the guidance is the art director who says, and then the editor who says, that's great or no, that's not going to work for this reason or that reason.
00:35:59
Speaker
Let me ask you this. Have you ever composed a work and you've done all of the Jeffrey Smith stuff? yeah You like it. It's got 40 years of commitment behind it in that moment. It's got all those things.
00:36:12
Speaker
And then you release it. And you'll have to forgive me because when I say release it, I don't know if you're releasing it to someone who was commissioning you or you just put it out in a gallery or whatever.
00:36:24
Speaker
And then, in I'm just personally curious, have you ever put something out and thought, Oh, man, I don't know if I should have done that for whatever the reason was. Maybe you didn't like the quality afterwards. Maybe you didn't like the message. Maybe you didn't like the way it was used. Is there anything like that where you thought, all right, I'm going reconcile. This is what it is.
00:36:42
Speaker
But this is it's something that you have to manage yourself through. Have you has have you had any experiences like that? I'm sure I have. i so that So you bring up a question. So the answer to it is the structure of the assignment is an art director calls in the 80s anyway. Now it's an email. But anyway, you get a phone call and art director on the other end is saying, hey, I really like your work.
00:37:04
Speaker
Could you do this assignment? but We have a story. it's It's a full page illustration assignment or it's a spot illustrat illustration assignment or it's a half page illustration assignment. It's all about the printed page, not a gallery, printed page.
00:37:16
Speaker
And we have X amount of time and X amount of money. So we have one week and it's $1,000. And of course, almost always the answer is yes, I do. And sometimes diving into waters that were far too deep.
00:37:33
Speaker
There were those epiphanies where I stood in a dark room looking up into the corner of the ceiling and seeing myself walking. as someone who was not capable of doing what I was supposed to be doing.
00:37:46
Speaker
lot of pressure. Anyway, so that's the structure of it, right? The phone rings, art director asks, based on money, time, and your portfolio, then they send the story over, you read it. Once you read it, you start submitting sketches, usually, and then from sketches to finished art based on the style of work they've seen, in my case, back then, watercolor.
00:38:09
Speaker
So that's the structure. And yeah, sure. I have gotten into trouble with things that I've either asked students to do or paintings I've painted, not too much trouble and tolerances have changed.
00:38:24
Speaker
In the eighties, you could do an assignment based on a Tennessee Williams story or Joyce Carol Oates or Flattery O'Connor. Now, and particularly with the woke culture and then COVID,
00:38:39
Speaker
You can't and you couldn't, and it'll come back, I think. So we go through these kind of cultural shifts and some things are possible at times and not at others.
00:38:51
Speaker
Many of the movies I love, The Maltese Falcon, all of the John Huston movies, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, those movies are somehow obsolete on a certain level now because...
00:39:05
Speaker
Not to me, they're not, they never will be, but to a bigger audience, I think, because they put concepts out there that people aren't comfortable with. So it's the same thing with literature.
00:39:17
Speaker
People are trying to ban books and everything like that now. So it's, it all is connected. But I made a living illustrating stories about murder and sometimes tangentially about homosexuality or about various forms of violence and then portraits and many other things.
00:39:35
Speaker
The regret, no, but it goes back to what you were talking about. I think you were talking a little bit about when life knocks you down, what matters is what you do when you get back up.
00:39:47
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Life has knocked me down a few times and I get back up and it always seems to work out. Despite some of my very wrongheaded instincts, I seem to be in an okay spot. I hope I am. Nothing I regret. the Regret would be the wrong word. I've done nothing i regret, but I've certainly done things that have presented lessons for me to pay attention to.
00:40:13
Speaker
In the introduction, I used the word editorial illustrator because that's how your biographical information expressed it. but But you've used various phraseology to describe the different things that you've done. But I've never in my head prior to you and I discussing to put the words editorial illustrator together. But then when I heard it, I thought, of course, I know what that means. When I see the work,
00:40:35
Speaker
I'm thinking it's communicating and conveying something, and it's likely con conveying some sense of how you personally feel about it. I don't know if that's the right way to say it. That's right. If that's true and you just said it is, then what I can't can conceive of well is beyond the obvious stuff. Okay, editorial illustrator, if the person's face looks really mad, they're probably mad about the circumstance they're in. But what are the other techniques and what are the other things you do within a piece of work that helps convey the story besides the most obvious tells?
00:41:04
Speaker
that people would look for in a picture? is Is it the color? is it the Are it the lines? Is it the size of the illustration? Or what kinds of things help tell the story?
00:41:15
Speaker
That's an excellent question. There is the conceptual storytelling side to it, right? The art director is gonna tell me if what I'm trying to do is going to be acceptable or not. For instance, I recently did an assignment for a magazine called Sojourners. I think it's a Christian magazine.
00:41:36
Speaker
hu And the story was about a cemetery in Georgia called Jubilee. And this cemetery keeps an open grave symbolically. for people who were dispossessed or maybe the person had been executed or maybe the person was home homeless and died or maybe the person was had migrated to the United States under very difficult conditions in the past. And so they keep this open grave.
00:42:01
Speaker
And that was the essential setup for the story. The art director, to be fair, he warned me that what this really needs to be about is the cemetery and the people that work there and what they do.
00:42:13
Speaker
What I wanted to do was get into the concept of a spirit, like a person standing, a ghost, essentially, standing in an open grave and then exploring that idea. He let me run with it until...
00:42:27
Speaker
as for for as long as he could, along with other sketches, more to his point of view. When the editor showed up in the process, the editor said, we can't do the spirit thing.
00:42:38
Speaker
So the art director said, that's no go. We got to go the other way. And that's how it went. That's the... How is it going to work? and How's it going to work? and And that's one side of it.
00:42:49
Speaker
The relationship of the illustrator, art director, editor is the one side of it. The internal side of it for me is how to form a picture.
00:43:02
Speaker
And that is a lot of years of looking inward and outward. For instance, concepts like chiaroscuro, atmospheric perspective, psychological color, pattern, silhouette, foreground, middle ground, background, hierarchy of white and black design, angle of view, rim light, in and out of focus, warm and cool, soft and hard edges, gradation, simplification, straights and curves, texture and undulation.
00:43:32
Speaker
Those are concepts that looking inward, they are a connection to my emotional self. Looking outward, those are things that exist in the world, in in nature and in art.
00:43:46
Speaker
And over the years, I have created that list for myself as a kind of guide to making an effective picture. For instance, undulation is a concept of like clouds in the sky or waves in the ocean.
00:44:04
Speaker
And I came upon that word around 1990, looking at the work of Paul Gauguin and Charles de Muth. The books written about them used the word undulation.
00:44:16
Speaker
I looked inward and thought of our experiences, you and I both, in the Catholic Church, and kneeling in a space where there's candlelight and the light is undulating.
00:44:29
Speaker
And I liked the concept, so I made an attempt to incorporate that into my work. And as it happens, it's a pretty natural effect that comes through watercolor. I appreciate you listing those. Even if I don't have a direct understanding of each term, I can certainly infer what they're what they're trying to do. And I'm even guessing that those concepts are speaking to the idea of what it is that you're after, what it is that you're going let go, what you're going to, what you will.
00:44:57
Speaker
compromise on or what you want if compromise is a word that we can use all those things are really maybe permissions right because they're all available to you so you have the permission to use all of them maybe some at one time and some at others and that is even more art because it's not only what you produce with the decisions that you make it's the things that you're producing with so undulation might be my work for you in one respect and maybe not another so hopefully i didn't get too deep into that but That's
Storytelling Passion and Creative Endeavors
00:45:25
Speaker
how I hear them. But listen, off mic, we talked a little bit about where we crossed paths. So maybe the first place we crossed paths is St. Paul High School.
00:45:33
Speaker
So now here it is almost 50 years later. And now we cross paths because it looks like in our own respective work, regardless of what we're trying to produce, that That production, the vehicle for the production is some type of storytelling, right?
00:45:46
Speaker
Because that's took exactly the language you've used in a lot of your work. And I started this podcast, and I've been at it for about a year and a half now, telling a story, some better than others, but all things that I can torture into some relevancy around the way life typically works.
00:46:01
Speaker
And maybe there's something somebody can draw from hearing different people talking about pretty much the same thing. Storytelling is just the essential, it's what matters. For instance, if I'm drawing a face,
00:46:16
Speaker
It's a story. Now, and I don't say that my evolution as an artist has made me better at it. Maybe it hasn't. It's hard to say. My response to a face as a guy drawing a face when I was 10 is a little bit different than when I was 18, than when I was 30, than when I was 50, and so on.
00:46:37
Speaker
Eric Kandel, great writer, the age of insight, is that the idea of knowing more is not necessarily the idea of being better, I think, because you have to process information and get it into your emotional bag.
00:46:54
Speaker
So if I didn't know when I was 20 what the frontalis, temporalis, obicularis oculi, corrugator supercili, proceris depressors supercili, zygomaticus major, zygomaticus minor, and so on and so forth.
00:47:12
Speaker
If I didn't know what those muscles were in a face, and I didn't know what they meant to the expression of the smile or a frown or a dual expression, fear in the eyes and joy in the mouth, of all of that, I wasn't necessarily less of an artist.
00:47:30
Speaker
because I was using my eyes to make an emotional response to something I loved or had some kind of feeling about. Now that I know all those things, it's a bigger job of utilizing those without that getting in the way.
00:47:45
Speaker
And how does it facilitate the same basic idea that you have an emotional response to something and you want it to be great. And also you want to enjoy the experience of making the drawing of the face. So storytelling, it it relates to a face, a body, an environment, nature, and it exists everywhere. We had a great love of music when we were in high school. We came of age at a time when music, rock and roll particularly, was an amazing medium from Led Zeppelin to the Beatles to everybody else, right? Storytelling.
00:48:19
Speaker
So the music, the way the guy plays the guitar is storytelling. The rhythm of the song is storytelling, everything. It's all storytelling. I said we had a Venn diagram at high school and then now with the storytelling part. And the reason I want to elaborate on that is because You and I aren't the only two storytellers in the world, right? Everybody has their way of maintaining their mental models of things. And part of what I was hoping to do with my podcast is tell people whatever they think, they can think something different. And then they can go back and think the same thing they want.
00:48:48
Speaker
Or they can think something brand new. When I think about deliver, it's really having the capacity to to meet objectives, right? It's actionable clarity that allows you to meet an objective, whether it's a painting or a report or a methodology.
00:49:03
Speaker
One of the systems thinking tenets is emergence. In i emergence, it's about the outcomes that emerge through delivery. They're often greater than what was planned or imagined. They're a hallmark of creativity and complexity.
00:49:15
Speaker
So for me, delivery is about exercising your gift of being able to decide what you're going to hold and what you're going let go of. And that's what the process of emergence is.
00:49:28
Speaker
Certainly, it is relevant in you know what I do, yes. I'm thinking of a songwriter I love who passed away during COVID named John Prine. And a couple of things John Prine said about writing, I'm only just referring to what he said, not directly quoting him, but he talked a bit about getting to the point in a song where you're writing about the things you can't see.
00:49:51
Speaker
He wrote in the lyrics of one song about he hopes he can forgive everyone who ever did him any harm. which is a little off the mark of what you're talking about, but maybe to say it like this, connection. Like so much of what we do is about connection, isn't it? You're a storyteller, you're making podcasts, and that is the very art of connecting with someone else and then deciding how they connect to the concepts that mean so much to you.
00:50:19
Speaker
The concepts for me, I think, just to be direct and efficient and not go too far along here, But nature is the great lesson.
Nature's Influence on Creativity
00:50:28
Speaker
like we Everything that is taught in art exists in nature and finding a way to utilize that, understand it, process it, and make it part of your thing, including the nature within us and the nature outside of us. That to me is central to becoming an artist with any degree of originality and and having a joy
00:50:54
Speaker
for what I do. The joy has to transcend the idea of being an illustrator. I've come to the view lately that I, ah my whole life I've been pretending I'm an illustrator. I'm actually just an artist.
00:51:05
Speaker
An illustrator is just a word. I don't care for illustration mostly. i don't like to look at illustration. I don't like to look at magazines. I don't, except maybe National Geographic and a couple of others, but I don't love illustration. I think it is basically, what is the word? Nostalgic in its style and it's boring and it's not something I cherish at all.
00:51:30
Speaker
But I think that the experience of storytelling, when you find yourself in a position to be a storyteller, it's an honor. It's a great thing. And I think you know that and I'm happy for both of us that we both have that possibility.
00:51:46
Speaker
Yeah, I appreciate that, Jeff. Listen, I'll tell you what, I think this is a good point to wrap things up, but I don't want to do that until you just get a chance to talk about the book that you're working
The Quixotic Journey: A Life Recount
00:51:56
Speaker
on. It's the title of The Quixotic Journey. i don't know if that's a working title, or if that's a final title, but just let the audience know a little bit about what's going on there.
00:52:04
Speaker
The illustrator, when they produce books, they're called portfolio books. It's basically a book with their pictures that they've made in it. And again, I find that very boring. A great friend of mine, James McMullen, is the author of several books, one of them about his life called Leaving China.
00:52:21
Speaker
And it's really an autobiography of his life as a boy in China during World War II and then his journey with his mother to Canada and then to New York and so on and so forth.
00:52:33
Speaker
And I thought that was beautiful. I thought that to take yourself seriously and write a book that shows what your life was about and what are the connections between your life, your upbringing, your Russian friend, and what you have ultimately decided to do. That's what I attempted to do.
00:52:51
Speaker
And I like the book, but I am hesitating in publishing it. Because it's personal. it's The reason I wrote it is because it's personal. And the reason I fear of publishing it is because it's personal.
00:53:05
Speaker
and So I find myself in a little bit of a dilemma. I'm sure time will work it out. But I i was knocked down COVID. 2020, I was unceremoniously released of my duties as a teacher after having taught for 26 years at that college.
00:53:26
Speaker
And it was a complete shock. And I won't go into the details of what happened, but it was a very strong shock to my my psyche. So what I did was i wrote a book.
00:53:41
Speaker
And I wrote a book not to be negative and not to blame anyone or do anything like that, but simply to, as a cathartic experience, at a very difficult time. It was a positive, cathartic experience. And I thought that was the best thing I could do, and among other things.
00:53:58
Speaker
And I'm proud of the book. I do like the book, and I think it's a a very good book. But i think it'll be a challenge to find a publisher, and so it'll probably, a book, if it gets published, will be self-published.
00:54:09
Speaker
I had an opportunity to look at it, Jeff, honestly. I thought it was extremely well done, and I'm not an expert in judging these types of things. But at first I thought, there's a lot of pages here, but the pages are full of the illustrations.
00:54:22
Speaker
And I understand the personal side of it. I can see it must have been a cathartic experience. So obviously, i think you use the right word. You're going to see it's going to emerge in whatever way it's going to emerge. I'll just say i we have known...
00:54:35
Speaker
each other for a very long time. We probably met in 1972, although I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I'm sure it was on a basketball court. I like storytellers. I like people that cherish it, that respect it, that think it's important. like I really do. And I love to listen to people's stories on a personal level, sitting at a table, drinking coffee, listening to friends tell their stories. It's one of my great joys. and I'm never happier than that, except when I'm drawing.
00:55:06
Speaker
So it's great to know that you are a storyteller. I did not know that about you. And i am honored to be selected to be a participant in your podcast series.
00:55:17
Speaker
And thank you very much for that opportunity.
00:55:35
Speaker
I want to take a moment to make some sense of what we just heard. Talking with Jeffrey Smith reminded me that the most remarkable artists and often the most meaningful leaders are those who live their practice, not just perform it.
00:55:49
Speaker
There is a will in Jeffrey that isn't driven by ambition alone. It's grounded in humility, vulnerability, and a lifetime of showing up for the work whether or not anyone is watching.
00:56:01
Speaker
That distinction matters because so much of what we call leadership today is performance. We perform certainty. We perform competence. We perform control. But the deeper work, the kind that actually shapes people and outcomes over time, rarely looks like that.
00:56:19
Speaker
Listening back to this conversation, what stayed with me wasn't any single insight. It was a pattern. Over and over, Jeffrey returned to attention, to patience, to presence, and to the discipline of staying with something long enough for it to reveal itself.
00:56:34
Speaker
That runs counter to how many of us were trying to think about leadership. Most of us learned a version that says, define a direction, align people, and execute.
00:56:45
Speaker
And there is truth in that. Clarity and follow through matter. But this conversation points to another capacity that is easier to miss. The ability to not rush in meaning.
00:56:58
Speaker
In systems thinking, we talk about leverage where small shifts can produce outside effects. One of the least discussed forms of leverage is where we place our attention over time.
00:57:09
Speaker
Attention shapes what we notice. What we notice shapes how we interpret. Interpretation shapes decisions. Decisions, repeated, become outcomes. That chain is always running whether we acknowledge it or not.
00:57:23
Speaker
And if we trace it back far enough, it begins with the simple question, what am I willing to stay with? Jeffrey's story suggested answer. Stay with what keeps drawing you in, even when it feels inefficient.
00:57:37
Speaker
Because progress rarely happens in straight lines. In art, in business, in relationships, and in our own development, real breakthroughs often arrive sideways.
00:57:48
Speaker
They emerge when we stop trying to control every variable and start allowing new patterns to form. That's the essence of emergence. Most of us want coherence first, but more often, if something we receive only after we've already begun.
00:58:04
Speaker
What Jeffrey models is a different posture, not compartmentalization, but con connection. None of us develops in isolation. Our practice is shaped by others, and whether we intend it or not, we shape others in return.
00:58:19
Speaker
The question isn't whether we influence. The question is whether we do it consciously, with care, and with enough humility to keep learning alive. In the end, Jeffrey reminds us that true art isn't only on the canvas.
00:58:33
Speaker
It's how we choose to live, how we see others, and how we translate our experiences into something meaningful enough to share. That translation, turning lived experience into leveraged connection, that's the work.
00:58:48
Speaker
Before we close, I want to honor Jeffrey, not just for the work he does, but for how he approaches it. There's a generosity in this conversation, a willingness to slow down and resist the pressure to perform insight rather than live into it.
00:59:02
Speaker
What I appreciate most is how Jeffrey reminds us, without even saying it directly, that craft is not something we master once. It's something we enter into again and again. That's the community we're really on.
00:59:15
Speaker
learning to notice what keeps surfacing and allowing it to inform how we lead ourselves. Jeffrey, thank you for the care you brought to this conversation. The Leaders To Me podcast was produced by Acuity Business Consulting.
00:59:29
Speaker
Acuity demystifies the challenge of transforming talent and resources into exceptional and sustainable organizational performance by surfacing actionable clarity in the areas of strategic design, financial management, operational excellence, and leadership development.
00:59:46
Speaker
You can catch a new episode every month wherever you enjoy your favorite podcast. Until next time, I am Jess Villegas, and you have been listening to the Leaders Commute podcast.