Most artists anticipate that their art will pay off financially. For Corbin Smith, whether that happens or not, it’s all about the meaning and creative process.
After discovering that he had been tragically injured and could not return to the ice as a hockey player, art became his muse.
“I played sports forever, my whole life I played sports and that was all I did,” Smith said. “Imagine going to school and then the rest of your day is filled with this one thing, and then that is it. So there was this gap that was filled in by the arts.”
Smith was fortunate enough to attend a regional secondary art school in which he lucked out by living within the geographical area.
“It wasn’t just photography, but I was exposed to everything from being in the Nutcracker and learning ballet, to being in different plays and playing the romantic hero, to being part of the yearbook,” he said.
Smith has been inspired from life experiences and has always had a love for photography and the arts. “It was always there, I just really like the idea of capturing moments and initially it was snapshots,” said Smith.
Learning basic photography led him to put his artistic creativity to the test by choosing to enroll into the Image Arts program at Guelph-Humber. Within the next year he plans to publish a book in hopes that it will be ready for when he enters his fourth year.
“My book will be based on traveling across the country, doing research, taking pictures for a book that I will be writing. It doesn’t have to sell one copy, to measure how I feel about my success,” he said. “Success is not determined by financial gain, it is something I feel good about. It has to be meaningful. If I get zero recognition and zero money from this, my book being an example, who cares? It will be a large achievement in my life that I took the initiative to do,” he added.
Smith has been inspired by his surroundings and is always on the lookout for what else might come.
“We take in so many images, and consume so much visually combined with so many other things all my visual photo based artwork that I do is personally meaningful to myself and is latent with symbolism,” Smith said.
Smith allows for other people to take what they want from his work without forcing a meaning to be acknowledged.
“I like as a consumer of art to know what is being done by that artist, but I make people work rather than telling people this is what they need to think. I leave it for people to interpret which is great because I can learn something new I never thought about when looking at my work,” he said.
Smith has many current projects in the works that incorporate photography, theatre, digital design and film; keeping this aspiring artist on his feet.
“I try to do more and more things for me,” Smith said.
You can log on to his website at www.corbinsmith.ca to see more.
