“I’ve leveled up,” illustrator Daniel Smelansky of Providence says with a chuckle of his latest gig: creating the cover of Motif’s Gift Guide. That’s because he made a word-and-image collage about the lack of nonbinary bathing suits for an article in the Queer Issue last June, and illustrated a Fun Map with pumpkins and ghosts and bats and a horse-drawn wagon for the inside of September’s Fall Guide.
Smelansky drew on his love of the funnies for the cover. It’s a comic strip style layout of panels in which a person is knitting, another is making a ceramic piece, and a couple is making a pie, while others deliver or open gifts.
“The message of my piece is to boycott big retailers like Amazon that are actively harming the planet, and instead support local businesses and makers,” he says. There are also a couple of, as he puts it, “warm and cozy” panels in which people are using their gifts.
The artist describes his favorite gift: “Last year, my partner, Sajada Domino, gave me a heavy brass lead holder, which I use all the time in my artwork.”
His favorite gift that he’s given is a book about gardening. He bought it at Paper Nautilus on South Angell St in PVD for his sister, Anya Smolnikova, a painter and visual artist who lives in Vermont. “Her big project is building out a garden at her home,” he says, adding, “She’s really a hard-core gardener.”
And he’d found the perfect book for her. It’s a collection of essays titled On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation. She loved it, and sent him via text message a picture of herself reading the book. “It chronicles gardening as it relates to artists and to society. It’s a really beautiful book,” he relates.
Smelansky feels close to his sister. “As a person and as an artist, she’s been a really big inspiration to me all of my life,” he says. He adds that his older brother, Ilya Smelansky, was always tinkering around and making animations while they were growing up in Boston. “I was raised in an artistic family,” the illustrator comments.
He was always drawing. So much so, that his fellow first graders pegged him as a future comic book artist. He didn’t veer from that path. In 2019, Smelansky received a BFA in Industrial Design from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He moved to PVD three years ago. “It’s more affordable than Boston. And it has a lot more creative people,” he says.
Smelansky uses graphite pencils, paint markers, and pastels in much of his artwork. He creates collages with words and images. “I like putting my little drawings onto bigger drawings, and sometimes incorporating notes I’ve written to myself in the piece,” he says.
The cover artist is inspired by American animator and film director Victoria Vincent, who is known online as Vewn. “She deals with really dark subject matter, but in a blasé or humorous way. I’ll use cute imagery myself to deal with similar subjects, draw the viewer in, and get them to really think about what’s going on in my work,” he says, adding, “I’m always thinking of how to take it a little further.”
Smelansky is also inspired by 20th-century, Canadian-American painter Philip Guston. “Visually, I love his work. And it’s become controversial recently because he dealt with racism and the KKK, making them an overarching theme,” he says. The culture wars got renewed with a vengeance when Trump reoccupied the White House, which he’s turning into a palace, according to political observers.
The current political climate is something that’s never far from Smelansky or his artwork. For instance, one of his drawings on an unfolded paper bag is titled You’re Not Overreacting Are You? “It came out of my feelings about reacting to the news. The title has something of a dismissive nature, as if said by someone who’d rather watch puppy videos,” he explains.
“There’s a time for that,” he quickly adds. “Sometimes you should watch a puppy video to feel better, but there is such a dissonance when you’re online also witnessing the terrors that are constantly happening.”
Smelansky, who also does graphic design, branding work, and photography, tackles uncomfortable subjects in his artwork. “I want to make people think. And help other people, who may consider themselves a little vulnerable, feel that they’re seen,” he says.
The artist unwinds by reading through his boxed set of the complete Calvin and Hobbes comic strip collection. “I especially like the way Bill Watterson showed little kid problems, questioned the way the world worked, and was able to represent time passing and narrative in one panel,” he explains, recalling some strips in which a story was told without words.
Some of the funniest strips were when Calvin and Hobbes tried to ambush each other with water pistols, or when Calvin aimed a water balloon at Susie, who was in his class at school. Oftentimes, she proved more than a match for him.
Smelansky marvels that Calvin’s feet looked like little loaves of bread. “It’s similar to the way I draw, bubbly in nature, and with a roundness to my characters,” he concludes.
–John Picinich
Smelansky’s artwork, website designs and photography can be viewed at his website danielsmelansky.com.