Interview with Katie Bonadies, December 2023
Trevor Elliott Smith primarily works in screen printing. He has been an illustrator his entire life and mostly worked with pencil in black and white until he got into printmaking and started using vibrant colors. Trevor has a background in architecture, which uses a lot of computer design and 3D modeling, and he has some digital graphic experience as well. Printmaking is a way for Trevor to get more primitive and it’s a welcome break from sitting in front of a screen in a cubicle. He has been at RWS for a year.
Trevor came to printing by way of music. He is an indie-rock, post-pop musician from Maine who grew up loving the 90s Seattle scene. The regionally specific music–Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden, to name a few–was his musical awakening along with some jazz and metal. At the same time, the screen printed poster was coming back and by the time he finished graduate school screen printed gig posters were becoming a fad again, “It had kind of disappeared after the early seventies and wasn’t as much a commodity in the eighties and early nineties. On the West Coast in the nineties it started ramping up like crazy and then died out again.” He has collected posters from some of the hundreds of concerts he’s seen and always frames them and hangs them on the wall of any apartment he lives in. Any time he sees musicians play he feels the immediate need to go home and create, “Even though I’m doing stuff every day, I’m still not doing enough. It’s never enough. That’s why we’re here.”
After moving to Seattle in 2017 Trevor took a three-hour screen printing class at a non-profit all-ages venue that had its own print studio and recording studio, “...and it changed my head completely.” He had seen finished screen printed products as gig posters and on merchandise at shows, but hadn’t known how they were made. After the class he started making gig posters for the venue and started figuring things out through trial and error. He learned a lot by playing with ink and started collecting the work of contemporary artists. If he could see the prints in person he could try to figure out how they were made, “I want to see the layers up close and figure out the techniques. Even when you buy the monograph book, you don’t always get that detail.” Now when he looks at a screen print he understands each layer of color because he has practiced the process.
Before the spread of Covid-19, Trevor had been printing in an empty warehouse owned by a screenprinter who let him print any time. But Seattle was ground zero for the Coronavirus in the States and the print studio closed its doors at the start of the pandemic. Without access to equipment he stopped making prints and moved back to Maine. Quarantine was an opportunity for Trevor to reflect on his career and better understand what influenced his decisions. The last architectural project he worked on in Seattle was a thirteen-thousand square foot mansion he had been working on for the entire four years he was at that firm. Everything was custom, but as an architect creativity is only a small part of the early stages of any architectural project, and working for the 1% went against his Maine values. Pandemic or no, Trevor needed a break from architecture.
When he was a child Trevor enjoyed building with Legos and cardboard or chipboard with glue and gluing together model car kits. He also liked to take everything apart because he was interested in how things were assembled. His earliest recollection of drawing houses was in preschool for an assignment to draw the house that he lived in. He remembers looking around and seeing what an actual house looks like versus the typical drawing of a house that a child makes, “From then on I just kept drawing houses. Everyone around me knew that architecture was going to be it for me from a very young age.” In high school he knew that was the track he was on, regardless of his second-guessing and wanting to go into more creatively stimulating fields. He’s not sure how much of that was his choice and how much was the influence of the adults around him.
Trevor’s whole professional life has been about straight lines and three dimensions, the inside of a space and the feel of the light coming into it as well as the space outside of it. He says, “Printmaking was just wonderfully limiting to the 2D surface, and screen printing is not like a painting that has texture on the surface; it has very fine, flat layers of overlapping ink.” This has been a welcome change for Trevor because it keeps him from overthinking everything.
Sometimes he has a plan when he’s printing, other times he goes through old sketchbooks with hundreds of pages of quick graphite sketches. When he sketches he doesn’t know what medium it is meant for; it could be an architectural design that ends up being a screen print someday, “A lot of things start with just an idea. I see it and I can’t even sketch it out; I just need to make a bunch of layers of color and see what happens.” Each project varies, but the subject matter of most of his prints typically include architecture, water, and trees.
He likes to work on multiple projects at once across mediums and is currently trying to figure out what to do with his career while working on two albums and a print that was inspired by an old charcoal drawing. He would love the opportunity to make gig posters again. It still feels like magic every time Trevor lays down a layer of color, “One of the best times I have is just coming here and putting my headphones on and doing what I know I need to do.” Now he knows, more or less, what the end result is going to look like. The colors will fluctuate and things don’t always line up; and that's the process. The hardest part is that he knows the image in his head looks amazing–he can see it finished on the wall–but he doesn’t always know how squiggly that line is going to be.
See those squiggly lines at the RWS Holiday Market in December; it will be Trevor’s first market of any kind. He can also be reached at trevorelliottsmith@gmail.com.
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