Cancer Claims Bremerton Artist, Musician Chuck Smart
by Michael C. Moore Kitsap
Sun Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Bremerton artist and musician Chuck Smart died Monday morning after a battle
with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.
Smart's business and studio partner, M. Anne
Sweet, said Smart recently made the decision to stop both dialysis on his
kidneys and radiation treatments for the cancer. He entered hospice care on
Christmas Eve, and both his wife, Dawn, and his brother, Sydney, were with him
when he died.
"[URL]He was comfortable and received good care and Dawn was able
to stay with him day and night," Sweet wrote in an e-mail to the artist's
friends and associates the morning of his death.
"He was an amazing light and a
creative artist spirit who never strayed from that path," wrote Sweet, who
collaborated with Smart on both art and music pieces and shared studio space
with him at Studio 68 on Fourth Street. "He will be deeply missed by all who
knew him."
Artist and Collective Visions Art Gallery co-founder Alan Newberg,
who also shared the studio space on Fourth Street with Smart and Sweet, called
Smart's death "a great loss to the artists' community not only in Bremerton,
but in the county and the whole state."
"I feel like I've lost a friend and
fellow artist," Newberg said Tuesday morning. "He was a true creative spirit in
our community."
Smart, a respected and fiercely independent artist who worked
in a variety of media, won "Best of Show" honors in last year's inaugural CVG
Show, a statewide juried art exhibition at Collective Visions.
"I was
completely surprised," Smart said of the honor bestowed on his digital piece
"Garden of Eve." "I couldn't believe it. I was off the planet."
"The show
helped get me a lot of attention," Smart told the Kitsap Sun in October. "It
was an opportunity to put some work in a statewide show, see what my peers are
doing."
Smart's mixed media piece "Life and Death" was selected for this year's
second edition of the CVG show, which will fill Collective Visions' display
space during February.
The October interview was conducted at Smart's Rocky
Point residence shortly after he had come home from the hospital, where he
received treatment for what he called "a kidney ailment." He did not divulge
that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The Smarts moved to West
Sound, where Dawn was raised, when Chuck was downsized out of a position at
Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. They lived in a borrowed house on Hood
Canal for a year, then moved into Bremerton to be closer to the ferry.
"We had
thought about moving to Brazil," he said. "But we came out here, and liked it.
We've been here 15 years now."
Funeral arrangements are pending.[/URL] |