The principal winner in the annual oil and sculpture competitive exhibition at the St. Louis Artists Guild last November, was MEICOM’s own John M. Smith, of the printing and forms control branch, Directorate of Installation Services. His painting, “Hearts and Flowers,” won a $300 prize, and two of his other paintings received honorable mention. These were the most recent of many awards and honorable mentions his paintings have merited since he won his first in 1950.
Smith began painting almost 30 years ago, when he was 15 years old and a student at Maplewood High School. He said that for as long as he can remember he has had a keen interest in art and attributes this to the fact that his father was “a very artistic man and a leather craftsman.”
From 1942 to 1945, Smith served with the United States Marine Corps, and even then found time to paint, capturing with his artist’s brush the aura of troops living in the field. It was during an action in the Palau Islands (approximately 200 miles south of the Philippines) that he lost the sight of his left eye.
Following his release from active duty, he attended Washington University School of Fine Arts, from 1946 to 1948. He then acquired a studio and spent all of his time painting, “until 1950,” he said “when I got married and had to go to work.”
He has been employed at MEICOM for five years. He works the midnight-to-eight shift in the reproduction section. He says he enjoys his work “because,” he remarked, “I have two fine bosses, Harold Ford and Ray Lindewirth.”
Smith has a 7-year-old son and nine daughters, ranging in age from 16 to 2 years old.
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