Thick descriptions of his technical processes (American Craft, Feb/Mar, 1996), his creative philosophy (Ornament, Autumn, 1997) and his artistic evolution (Surface Design Journal, Fall 1989) have already been published and are easily accessible, along with a virtual showroom of his collection, at www.shibori.com. Between the lines of text-including his quoted monologues-is an inexhaustible drive and obsessive commitment to keep moving what he does into unexplored territory.

     Smith was perfectly situated in time and space to become a vehicle for expressing the visual zeitgeist of the psychedelic generation. He was nineteen in 1965 and living in northern California when he hitchhiked home from college to find his mother conducting a tie-and-dye workshop in the kitchen. I was artistically inclined but inhibited by my mother, who was a fabulous artist," he observes, "so I grabbed hold of tie-dye and ran with it- because it wasn't painting-which she did really well."

     Three years later he was "hopelessly engrossed" in fabric dyeing, turning it into a business that paid for his MFA in sculpture from the University of California/Santa Barbara and which, in turn, kept him out of "the graduate school of Vietnam." Smith was (by his own reckoning) one of three-to-four million people doing tie-dye between 1965 and 1972, thereby saturating the look of those years with the fluid color and celestial patterning that have become an enduring American symbol of antiestablishment, alternative-and altered--states of mind.

Surface Design Journal