Joshua Smith

A dream is a strange place to begin a career.

Joshua Smith starts there anyway.

He’s sixteen, walking into a coliseum. A crowd roars. At the center, a man is being crucified. As he moves closer, something clicks. The man is him. Then he’s on the cross, looking out, exposed, awake.

That image never really leaves him.

“I was like, okay… what is this about?”

Years later, that question still fuels everything he makes.

Joshua is an oil painter working in a surreal, romantic language. The kind of paintings people linger on. The kind some people back away from. He paints dreams not as decoration, but as confrontation. Not to escape reality, but to step directly into the parts most people would rather avoid.

The first time someone asked him to paint a dream, he barely knew how to paint at all.

It was high school. Senior year. His first art class ever. The assignment was simple. Paint one of your dreams.

“It turned out terrible. It didn’t make any sense.”

But something cracked open anyway.

That failure sparked a lifelong pursuit. Not perfection. Not polish. Just honesty. The kind that comes when you stop trying to make something palatable and start making something true.

For Joshua, dreams became a mirror.

“Every person in your dream is a version of you.”

That idea sits quietly underneath his work. Each figure. Each shadow. Each unsettling moment. They are all fragments asking to be seen. He talks about using dreams as a lens to look at your own life, especially the parts you didn’t want to face.

“You face it. And you’re able to complete yourself.”

There’s a tenderness in the way he describes it. Even when the imagery is dark.

One painting comes from the aftermath of his divorce. His youngest daughter appears beneath a hovering light. Protected. Watched over. A quiet promise embedded in paint. The work isn’t loud about what it’s saying, but it’s deeply personal. These aren’t symbols chosen for effect. They’re moments lived, processed slowly, and translated through brushstrokes.

Not everyone is comfortable with that.

“I’ve had people say, ‘Your paintings are a little creepy.’”

He shrugs it off.

“I’m not going to change that. It’s just what comes out.”

If the paintings were too pretty, he says, we wouldn’t deal with that side of ourselves. The side that needs attention. The side that asks better questions than easy answers.

Before all of this, Joshua was a personal trainer. He was on a different path entirely. But when the dreams intensified, so did the feeling that something had to give.

“I just stopped everything. I quit my job. I had to soul search.”

That leap didn’t come with guarantees. But it led him somewhere unexpected. Eventually, his work was shown at the Louvre. A moment that felt almost unreal. Iconic. Not as a finish line, but as confirmation that listening to yourself matters.

Still, his advice is grounded. Almost stubbornly simple.

“Do your art every day if you can. Don’t ever stop for any reason.”

Not to make a masterpiece. Not to chase validation. But to let the process shape you.

“Use it as a process to help your soul grow.”

He talks about each day as a second chance. An opportunity to not dwell on the past. To choose presence over regret. To care less about how the work is received and more about how it feels to make it.

“What you feel about yourself is the most important thing.”

There’s no neat bow on Joshua Smith’s story. No tidy moral. Just momentum. Dreams that keep showing up. Paintings that refuse to soften. A commitment to showing up again tomorrow, brush in hand, ready to look at himself a little more clearly.

This is his field trip.