Text and images used by permission.
This edition of Dek Unu is very unusual in that it features three artists: life partners Amanda Smith and Kevin Tully along with their "friend" Franklin Cincinnatus, a writer, adventurer, and hanger-on whom many suspect of being entirely imaginary.
Amanda Smith is the founder and co-director of A Smith Gallery in Johnson City, Texas. She has been a photographer for over thirty-five years as well as a CPA. She used both her knowledge of photography and business skills to create the gallery 15 years ago. Amanda has been a champion of photography, photographers, and the creative potential of the photographic process as a teacher, curator, promoter and judge for well over 200 juried and curated exhibitions in her own and others' galleries and online. From a beginning in traditional darkroom photography, her work is now primarily digital with creative analog and alt-process additions. Her artworks in this portfolio, her "sisters," are imaginative photocomposites.
Kevin Tully is Amanda's co-director and creative partner for A Smith Gallery and a photographer, designer, writer, and artist. With over thirty-five years of experience as a landscape designer, furniture designer, fine art painter, and photographer, he has taught workshops on various aspects of art and photography for over twelve years. He has curated and installed hundreds of exhibitions for the gallery and has been a juror for numerous calls-for-entry for the gallery and local organizations, as well as international exhibitions. Kevin and Amanda are each others' first, best critics and collaborators.
Franklin Cincinnatus. According to a bio from an old "Paris Review" that Kevin found among the magazines at the shop where he gets his oil changed, Frank was born physically and cognitively adult. His frightened parents left him at a fire station at 3:00 AM and disappeared, no forwarding address. A very liberal local librarian rescued him, naming him after Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus. The "child" read most of In Watermelon Sugar that first night. It is conjectured that he lives in a little stone house in Central Texas with 3 cats, a bird, a very happy woman, and a pistol that he accidentally dropped in the toilet when drunk one Columbus Day. The pistol, rusted and useless, sits next to a framed photograph of the librarian. Frank contributes the image commentaries for this issue's portfolio section and adds assorted illuminating remarks to the artists' interview.
