Simon Mark Smith

Simon Mark Smith is a singer-songwriter, painter, artist, digital artist, writer, and photographer. For much of his life, he lived in London but moved to the south coast of England a few decades ago.

Having earned a degree in Fine Art painting at the prestigious Chelsea School of Art in 1988, he then exhibited his paintings for a number of years, including exhibitions at major galleries such as the Laing, Diorama, and Macintosh. During this period, a lot of his work was focused on disability rights issues, however, sensing his audience within the art world was somewhat restricted, he started to produce music and became the first disability issue based artist to release a mainstream album that included disability politically inspired pop and rock songs. The album, Entitled, was released in 1993 and gained critical success and mainstream coverage. Throughout this time, Smith also wrote many articles which appeared in art magazines, as well as the disability media. Furthermore, a number of his poems were published in magazines, as well as some being commissioned to appear in several Microsoft publications. From that point onwards, music was Smith’s main avenue of expression, and over the following twenty years he continued to produce another four music albums.

Apart from his time working within the disability issue based art world, Smith also worked as a policy advisor for The Arts Council, UK, a teacher, property developer, IT consultant, and studio photographer, as well as continuing his practice and study of Kyokushinkai Karate, which he did so for over 50 years.

Smith is currently in the process of publishing a further three books, including volume two of his autobiography, a travel diary, and a book of poems and lyrics. Had he had enough time, which he doesn’t, there would’ve been a third volume of the autobiography, a book on why various styles of karate perform techniques differently and one about his photography.