Robert Smith
Robert Smith's struggle with cancer ended Tuesday, June 15. Tarrant County College extends deepest sympathy to Robert's beloved family and friends. With them, we mourn the loss of a gifted alum. Robert sought and found at TCC greater growth in his creativity. It is TCC's privilege to serve all who, like Robert, desire fuller lives.
A memorial service for Robert will be held at 11 a.m. Tuesday, June 22, at Coker-Hawkins Funeral Home in Decatur.
Robert Smith's oil paintings work hard. Their gritty realist/surrealist images haunt, compel, comfort and delight. He tried to walk away from all of that once. But art "is something I have to do," the TCC alum said. Particularly now during his pitched battle with cancer.
Smith's latest exhibit was "almost all influenced by cancer," he said. Titled "Random Thoughts of a Cancer Survivor, Veteran and Aging Baby Boomer," the exhibit at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center exuded urgency. "Cancer has redefined my life," he explained. "I have realized that life is taken for granted. I'm trying to express this through my art in hopes that others may realize it as well."
It's work that he had given up to pursue engineering at Lockheed Martin. "It was paying the bills," he said. "Art wasn't." But in December 2003, Smith was diagnosed with a type of throat cancer. Many rounds of treatment followed. During recovery three years later, he left engineering and returned full time to his first love--art--as he'd done years before at Tarrant County Junior College where he received his Associate of Arts degree in 1980.
Smith enrolled at TCC, taking new art courses. He transferred to the University of North Texas, graduating in May 2009. That following September, he was diagnosed with an aggressive recurrence of the cancer. "I had a radical neck mastectomy, which took away most of the tissue and muscle in (the left side of) my neck," he said.
Treatments and his fight against cancer have left him physically drained, Smith said. But he cannot ignore his calling nor his brushes, paints and visions. "What will be will be," he said. And he wants to capture it on canvas.
-- By David House