Artist Keeps Head in the Clouds

Steve Tack inherited his love for art and aviation from his grandfather.

As a child, Tack would sit in the older man’s garage in Rolling Hills and watch him paint pictures of warplanes and aircraft carriers from wars the United States has been involved in. Sometimes he got to hold the brush, helping his grandfather add a line here or dab of color there.

“I was definitely fascinated with how he could create something so real with pencil and paint,” said Tack, 36, who once aspired to be a Navy pilot. “I was learning it.”

Those lessons apparently paid off.

As a civilian photographer for Naval Base Ventura County, Tack is following in the footsteps of his late grandfather: R.G. Smith, a renowned naval aviation artist and aerospace engineer who helped design many of the planes he re-created on canvas.

When not photographing missile tests and rocket launches at Point Mugu, the father of four is at his home in Santa Monica, painting pictures of military planes in action. His artwork includes the Thunderbirds flying in formation, F-14 jets roaring past burning oil fields in Kuwait and World War II fighter planes zooming over a herd of mustangs in the desert.

Tack has created hundreds of paintings, many reproduced as lithographs and posters for air shows and aviation events across the country.

His pieces are also commissioned by military installations and private collectors for display.

Don Carlton, 72, a real estate agent from Ventura, owns a number of paintings from Tack’s grandfather.

Carlton recently started commissioning oil paintings from Tack, saying he wants to carry on the family tradition. He also is impressed with Tack’s artistic realism, something his grandfather was famous for.

“When you look at it, it’s not like you’re looking at a picture of an airplane. You feel the action,” said Carlton. “It’s almost like it’s in motion.”

Some of Tack’s works now hang alongside his grandfather’s.

For 30 years, two of Smith’s paintings have been on display in the officers’ club at the Marine Corps Air Station in Yuma, Ariz. In 1995, not realizing the two artists were related, an official there commissioned Tack to produce some posters for an upcoming air show.

That official--retired Marine Corps Col. Don Mitchell--asked Tack how he got started, and soon learned the connection. Mitchell has since commissioned the younger man to create two other paintings for the club, the most recent of which is still in the works.

“When he puts a plane together [on canvas], it looks like an airplane is supposed to,” said Mitchell, now civilian director of community service at the air station. “He basically goes to great pains to make it correct.”

Tack credits his grandfather’s influence.

While growing up, Tack would often bring his artwork to his grandfather for an opinion. Smith, who had no formal training as an artist, would point out how the picture could be improved.

He also taught Tack the power of influence. Instead of painting every rivet on a plane, for instance, he suggests it with the sweep of a brush.

Painting isn’t Tack’s only passion. He graduated from USC in 1989 with a bachelor’s degree in cinema and television and hopes to work in Hollywood as a writer or director. He has written several screenplays--one that centers on aviation.

Tack, who is working on his private pilot’s license, shared a love of flying with his grandfather, who got hooked after Charles Lindbergh completed his transatlantic flight in 1927.

Eight years later, Smith joined Douglas Aircraft Co., where he helped design planes including the SBD Dauntless, AD Skyraider and A-4D Skyhawk.

Smith wanted to enlist after Pearl Harbor was bombed, but military officials refused, saying his work as an aerospace engineer was too important in the war effort.

However, when he was in his mid-50s he convinced his superiors to let him to go Vietnam, where he spent two tours as a civilian, painting the action for the Navy.

There’s the silhouette of a sailor on a patrol boat, a U.S. fighter jet shooting down an enemy plane over North Vietnam and a ground crew preparing another fighter jet for takeoff from an aircraft carrier.

Smith created more than 2,000 aviation paintings before his death in May at 87. His works hang in such places as the Pentagon and the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Today, Tack keeps a photo of Smith on the wall above his easel. He looks up at it now and then as he paints.

“I’m still a student of my grandfather’s,” said Tack. “He’s left thousands of lessons behind in his paintings. I hear him speak when I’m painting. It helps guide me.”