SMAart Gallery & Studio was founded in September 2012 and opened its doors at 1045 Sutter Street in San Francisco.

SMAart offers gallery exhibits, studio rentals and ceramic classes.  While the center primarily caters to ceramic artists, artists of every media are welcome.  Founder Steven M Allen opened SMAart to fulfill a longtime dream of having a gallery, a place to teach art to the community, and a place to create art in a creative open environment surrounded by other inspiring artists.  

Conveniently located in the Lower Nob Hill neighborhood with access to several major bus lines.  SMAart is also positioned in the heart of the Lower Polk Art Walk offering participating artists access to a burgeoning art scene.

Bay Area–based artist Woody Miller colors outside of the lines, having worked on everything from murals and corporate logos to travel paintings and t-shirt screen printing. He is inspired by the paradigm of a city and illustrates San Francisco street scenes. Since receiving his B.A. in Illustration from the Academy of Art in 2001, Woody has been selected in shows up and down the coast of California, including the city's STUDIO Gallery, Gallery Saratoga, and San Jose's Kaleid Gallery.

The wonder and mystery witnessed in the smashing together of humanity is what often draws one to the 'city'.  Each city, each village, every town, has it's own thumbprint created by the people who travel through and those who call it home.

Through painting, Woody's aim is to reflect the paradigm that is a city - the mingling and weaving together of various cultures, different bodies, all manner of food, beauty, style, and religions, to form a new identity. It is this coming together that creates a new city, with new character.

People often ask me if I like to do puzzles, or tell me I’d make a great dentist (based on the intricate poking, prodding, scraping and filling that I do in my work).  I used to feel that working on mosaics was a way to bring order to chaos, by rearranging a multitude of tiny pieces together to form cohesion.  Realistically, for me, it’s none of these things.  Rather, it’s the possibilities that can come from a variety of pieces and materials.  It both astonishes and entices my mind.  Something about discovering an unknown combination or design that doesn’t exist in the world, is intoxicating.  This is how I feel when I am creating mosaic art.

Mosaics are not a fluid art form; they don’t blend into one another like oil paints, or mold into figures with soft lines that gently curve.  They are rigid and abrupt and can be unforgiving.  However, it’s the adventure to create these illusions, with proper coaxing of the medium, which I find intriguing.  I work with ceramics, glass & stone, like a linguist when they are interpreting.  I feel like I’m giving a voice to materials in a new and expressive way so people can visually understand what the gathering of pieces have to say.

Born and raised in Twin Falls, Idaho, I am the son of educators and am descended from bankers, politicians, ranchers, farmers, business people, common people, proud people, matriarchs, Scots, and Basques.

Originally trained in Applied Mathematics, my professional life was primarily consumed with business operations, technology consulting, and software engineering, navigating startup companies and the Fortune 500.

I have written music, poetry, and screenplays. I attended Seattle Film Institute focusing on screenwriting in 2003/2004. Since July 2004, I am a husband; March 2006, a father; and November 2007, a painter of acrylics on canvas. In June of 2012, I transitioned to be a full-time working artist and (as of August 2012) an Alternative Energy Healer/Facilitator of Consciousness.

I relocated to California from Seattle in 2013 and have exhibited in numerous Seattle venues. I have had work on display at the Alki Arts Gallery since August of 2010 and have work showing at Alki Arts/Harbor Steps as well as in Meyer Wells, Seattle Design Center.

I was a contributing artist to the 2012 and 2013 Artist Trust Benefit Auctions. In addition, proceeds from my work have benefitted Deep Roots (deeproots.org), Alki Elementary School, DAWN (Domestic Abuse Women’s Network), PAVE (Partnerships for Action, Voices for Empowerment) and the Alzheimer’s Association. My art is in private collections in the northwest and beyond.

I experiment in abstract nature, figures, colors, concepts, and process. Thematically, I consistently explore the boundaries of reality. I am an artist for change.

For the past seven years I have developed two artistic styles, both dominated by a preoccupation with the virtual world of the screen. It started when I moved to San Francisco from France in 2006 and suddenly realized I was living in the very movie sets that had entertained my childhood. What were once imaginary backdrops of Hitchcock films now figured prominently in my trips to the store. It was a surreal and unsettling sensation that lead me to question the realities of virtual and real space. It was also at this same time that Facebook and social media spaces started taking hold of popular culture and redefined who and where we were as people. I found myself fascinated with the world as something we understand and live through screens and thus turned to my training as an academic painter to explain and explore these ideas.
    The first of my two styles focused on cinema and my aesthetic experience of it as a child. With a palette knife I reproduced scenes from VHS tapes that had affected me and questioned my relationship with them. It was both a study in these iconic moments that now overlapped into my new geography and an artistic meditation on what the screen actually looked like. Computers had already accustomed us to flat, high definition virtual worlds but the truth is that these scenes were filled with static and  imperfections. My work has pushed me to analyze the power of these memory images, how I see them in relationship to my current life and memories, and to question the overlap of the television screen and the world around me. Recently these questions have lead me to apply the moiré effect found in old television screens to reproduced images from my personal life and Californian culture.
    The second of my styles turned to the concept of the screen as a portal to our identity in the age of internet. I spent eighteen months in residence at the SFMOMA Artists Gallery painting over 180 portraits of people who contacted me through Facebook. I wanted to find a way to bridge my training as a portraitist with the concept of visual identity in a world that was becoming rapidly digital. In a day of excessive personal sharing and over exposure it was fascinating to realize how few of us actually consider our image as something outside of the digital screen space.
    As I continue to explore the concept of the screen and its implications on space and identity, I hope to expand my practice and discover new meaning in an increasingly virtual world through both traditional and modern painting techniques.

Whereas I am always engaged with more complex bodies of work that often take months, if not years, to come to formal fruition, these pictures, these squares, they are always constant, and they are right here and right now.

The origin of this group of pictures can be traced back a number of years ago to an image I made of myself in my underwear with a large coffee filter on my head, holes cut out for eyes. This image was the start of many playful performative portrait sessions for me. Over time, what was once a practice of using exclusively my image in these pictures has now expanded in scope to include various friends and people I meet in the course of my journeys.

This work has become a collaborative practice of “making” pictures with others, versus the less collaborative “taking” pictures of others. I think of the pictures as part of a collection that I can always add pieces to, and get excited in the moment when I’m working on a completely different and unrelated project and I realize I’ve made one of these squares, something to add to the constantly evolving collection of performative portraits.

The portraits themselves happen quickly, and are often unrehearsed, a result of inviting friends over for breakfast or dinner, or from meeting someone who seems to be equally interested in my beard as they are my unusual camera and photographic techniques. An explanation of my practice usually includes me asking, “Will you make a picture with me?” Most people usually agree.

Although possibly lacking a period at the end of the sentence they create, these images should be viewed as no less intentional than anything else I create. They are quite possibly more intentional and hold more promise because they don’t have a permanent home in a more formal body of work. They are nomadic and wandering, but always contain the same motivations and goals. 

I am drawn to how light shifts our perception of what surrounds us, creating a halo of soft diffusion or pockets of ambiguity. I am intrigued by patterns and distortions in landscapes- where images of what is "real" and what is "reflected" are set adrift or submerged in a nebulous space.

I’ve shifted from pure abstraction to more abstracted landscapes since moving further outside of the city. I mainly draw inspiration from the local wetlands preserve in Sonoma County, though the work is mostly invented in my studio by recalling light and sensations.

The light is inextricably connected to the water, the land, and the atmosphere. These elements have inspired me to create momentary, imagined, experienced, and idealized situations in my paintings. The paint itself becomes a part of the landscape experience- the soil, the light, the sentiment- and it guides the forms that allude to the land.

I marvel at the mystery that exists in the stillness of the shadows. My process has become a romantic exploration of drifting, pulling apart, converging, ascending, and descending.