Hello!

Thoughtfully designed encounters with nature—in drawing, print, photography, and wood.

Christopher Owen Smith was born in mid-Ohio, and studied ceramics and painting at the Columbus College of Art & Design, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His academic career was followed by several months in Japan for Soto Zen monastic training in the Japan alps and a sculptural/ceramic apprenticeship with Kakuho Saito on the Fukui coast. After a couple road trips across the U.S., he now lives and works in Northeast Ohio. Inspired by the natural rhythms & textures in nature, and Naturalist John Muir, who said, “When we tug at a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world.”

Wild Pulp/The Open Forge

2010-Ongoing   A fine art stationery line featuring charcoal drawings, the Bark Animal collection, the Nest Building series, the Bright Souls, and the Stone Dinosaurs. It’s been stocked in boutique shops, natural history and science museums throughout the U.S. and Canada. Wild Pulp has received industry accolades from The National Stationery Show, was featured in home living periodicals, Crate and Barrel’s catalog, and on West Elm’s blog. All Wild Pulp note cards are printed on 100% post-consumer waste paper which utilized wind energy for it’s production, and the prints are made in studio with archival pigment inks on heirloom quality cotton rag papers.

Exhibitions

Eppig Gallery at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Cleveland, Ohio, Malvina J. Freedson Gallery, Lakewood, The Nature Center at Shaker Lakes, Shaker Heights, FAVA (The Firelands Association for the Visual Arts), Oberlin, Yard Projects at Worthington Yards, Cleveland, Summit Artspace, Akron, Heights Arts Gallery, Cleveland Heights, Spaces Gallery, Cleveland

You can see my exhibition portfolio here.