Former Odessa artist passes away

The Odessa art neighborhood dropped a longtime friend.

Previous Odessa resident Becki Smith passed absent final week from a brain tumor on May five.

Smith and her husband Jon M. Smith, moved to Driftwood near Austin in 2013.

Becki Smith attended courses at University of Texas of the Permian Basin wherever she was taught by affiliate professor of art Chris Stanley.

Stanley explained Smith as “an incredible artist.”

“As a instructor, there’s this detail identified as raw creative expertise and Becki experienced that,” Stanley said.

Stanley, who has taught at UTPB since the fall of 1992 claims that Smith was a person of his early college students.

“I was a incredibly young instructor when I was hired,” Stanley said. “For me, I was so privileged to have these incredible college students that have been right here when I got right here. Becki and her classmates have been, what I even now assume, famous as considerably as what they’ve absent on to do just after graduating. Becki’s decline is these a tragedy for the art environment in general but also for Odessa as very well.”

Smith’s get the job done focused on 3-dimensional assemblages and paintings that normally experienced found objects as portion of the composition.

“She was a mixed media artist,” Stanley said. “She was a person of those people artists that did not have a boundary. She was fearless and would use elements that have been in a great deal of strategies that people would not normally do. If you search at her artwork, you see that fearlessness with applying unique elements to have a voice.”

In addition, she experienced most of her get the job done photographically documented as very well as a current resume listing the a variety of regional and nationwide venues her get the job done was exhibited.

Her family has been heavily associated in the art environment.

Stanley said Smith left an effect in the regional art scene all through her time in Odessa.

“I assume she was fundamental in us making an creative neighborhood, her entire family in a way,” Stanley said. “She has a daughter which is a environment-course photographer now,” Stanley said. “Her husband is an incredible photographer. I assume when you have a family which is so associated with the arts, they develop their personal gravitational pull. That was Becki. There was an academic aspect to her but then there was also this creative aspect to her and getting those people people in your neighborhood that are significant about art and earning a great deal of art and displaying it a great deal, it’s vital to have a potent creative neighborhood and Becki was that human being.”