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George Smith, an artist member of the Fallbrook Art Association, will give a demonstration of the technique of collage at the Association's next meeting, to be held on Tuesday, April 12, at 8 p.m. in the high school band room. The meeting is open to the public.
Smith brings to the demonstration a training background that spans two continents and some of the most distinctive art institutions of the mid-twentieth century. He studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, a school that occupied a singular place in American art education from its founding in 1921 until it was merged into the California Institute of the Arts. Noebert Murphy Chouinard established the school with a conviction that professional rigor and fine art sensibility were not opposites, and the institution bore that out across four decades of graduates who went on to reshape both commercial and fine art in the United States.
Chouinard's Reach
Chouinard's influence spread in directions that are still felt today. On the commercial side, the school functioned as a direct pipeline to the Hollywood animation industry, producing artists who defined the look of American popular culture. Chuck Jones, who gave Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck their comic timing and visual personality, trained there, as did Wolfgang Reitherman, whose directing work shaped a generation of Disney features. Mary Blair, whose bold color sense and flattened forms became the visual language of films like Alice in Wonderland and the ride "it's a small world," also came out of that tradition. Bob Mackie, who would later become the definitive name in theatrical costume design, studied at Chouinard as well.
The school was equally serious about fine art. Ed Ruscha, whose deadpan paintings of words and Los Angeles landmarks became central to American Pop Art, studied there. So did Lita Albuquerque and Patrick Nagel, each of whom developed a highly recognizable visual style. The faculty was no less distinguished than the student body. Painter Millard Sheets taught at Chouinard, and the modernist architects Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler both lectured there, connecting students to the broader intellectual currents running through West Coast design in the postwar decades. The school was, in short, a crossroads where California Scene Painting, early animation, graphic design, and avant-garde fine art all met and influenced one another.
Mexico City and the Postwar Art World
Smith also studied at Mexico City College, an institution that drew a remarkable concentration of American artists, writers, and veterans during the 1940s and 1950s. Many of those students were there on the G.I. Bill, which made serious study abroad financially possible for men who had recently come out of military service. The college became a genuine gathering point for expatriates and working artists, and the cultural atmosphere of Mexico City at that time, still alive with the legacy of the great muralists, gave students an exposure to monumental, socially engaged art that was hard to find anywhere in the United States.
Smith himself was discharged from military service before turning his full attention to his art, and his time in Mexico clearly shaped the range and ambition of his subsequent work. He has since become one of the most accomplished artists in the Fallbrook area, exhibiting and winning awards in Pasadena, San Fernando, Vista, Carlsbad, Oceanside, and Mexico City. That list of venues reflects both regional engagement and an international reach that is unusual for a local artist.
A Versatile Practice
Collage is one medium among several that Smith works in regularly. He also produces paintings in oil and watercolor, as well as works in pen and ink and pencil. That range of media is consistent with the kind of training he received, first at Chouinard, where students were expected to move fluently between fine art and applied disciplines, and then at Mexico City College, where the surrounding culture encouraged artists to think across boundaries of form and material.
Collage as a technique has a history reaching back to the early twentieth century, when artists began treating cut and assembled fragments of existing material as a legitimate pictorial language rather than a craft curiosity. By the 1960s it had moved well into the mainstream of studio practice, and a demonstration by a trained artist gives observers a chance to see the decisions involved, from the selection and preparation of source material to the compositional choices that turn disparate pieces into a coherent image.
The April 12 meeting offers Fallbrook residents a direct look at that process from an artist whose background connects the local art community to some of the most significant institutions and scenes in twentieth-century American art. The meeting begins at 8 p.m. and is open to all.
