photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Award-winning painter Celia Smith is pictured in her Lawrence studio on Aug. 27, 2025.

At 96, Celia Smith has had more time than most to look at the world.

For nearly a century, she has lived a life of observation and creation — much of it in a home that from the street looks like a typical Lawrence split-level from the 1960s but from the inside feels like an homage to her native Spain, where she was born during the reign of King Alfonso XIII.

Against a floor-to-ceiling backdrop of hand-crafted pottery, paintings and pieces of Old-World furniture, Smith leads the way to her home studio, raising one of her two canes to point out a favorite picture or terra cotta jug along the way.

“This,” she says, stopping in a narrow hallway, “is a portrait of my family.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith discusses her portrait of her family in her Lawrence home.

In the upper left of the mostly green painting quartered by a blue cross is her husband, a retired KU professor, engaged in study.

“He is always reading,” she says fondly.

Celia is at the bottom right of the painting, sitting among her paintings at Art in the Park, which she has participated in since the late ’60s. In the other two corners and middle are her children and a grandchild engaged in creative pursuits — all surrounded by beloved animals.

“The main focus is on how fast the years go … and how we grow old,” says Celia, who has now outlived one of her daughters.

Robert and Celia met about 65 years ago after Celia came to the United States to study in Boston. They lived in Paraguay for a bit and traveled widely in Europe and South America. For many years they owned a cabin in the mountains of Idaho.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A photograph in their dining room shows Celia and Robert Smith on the back deck of their home.

“I married a nice, good-looking American who got this job at KU, so we came to Lawrence,” she says matter-of-factly but with girlish glee. The couple still live in the home they built in Lawrence’s Indian Hills neighborhood when Lyndon Johnson was president.

For many years, Celia, a librarian by day, painted in the basement in a makeshift studio, but as her art career took off the couple added a professional-caliber studio above their garage, designed by architect Dan Rockhill.

The studio is full of light and paintings and books, including multiple copies of Miguel Cervantes’ “Don Quixote.” Celia has a great affinity for her fellow, if fictional, countryman.

“He’s so far-fetched,” she says of Quixote, who mistook windmills for giants and prostitutes for princesses, but he represents the power of imagination and the desire, if sometimes delusional, to make the world a more beautiful place.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A volume of “Don Quixote” in Celia Smith’s studio

On her easel a half-finished acrylic painting rests — a work she was preparing for Art in the Park this coming weekend. A cozy wood-burning stove sits dormant in the August heat. Outside the studio, one catches glimpses of a Mediterranean-style garden with a sparkling blue swimming pool – an oasis for Celia, who needs even in the Kansas summer to be outside among the trees and clouds and animals that she has painted all her life.

“Painting was our fun,” she says of her childhood in Málaga, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. “We always painted.”

Picasso, another painter who spent his childhood in Málaga, although 40 years prior, is one of Celia’s favorite artists, but she prefers his Blue Period over his later “crazier” abstractions. The impressionist Paul Cezanne is another favorite, along with Vincent Van Gogh.

In terms of her own work, one of her favorite subjects to paint has been the landscapes and history of her adopted country.

“We have had a wonderful life in Lawrence,” she says, and she has made it a point to learn as much as she could about the area’s past.

One year long ago she and Robert re-created the journey of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, starting in Missouri and finishing on the West Coast, painting all along the way, “all the way to the Pacific.”

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith’s painting of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

“One day, (Thomas) Jefferson conceived the idea, the curiosity, and asked ‘What is beyond those mountains?’ and he got Lewis and Clark to go see,” she says.

One of her paintings is a kind of ode to the duo’s famous expedition, depicting the people, animals and majestic landscapes the explorers came across.

Another of her paintings, titled “Kansas Stories,” combines in one canvas four stories related to the state’s history, including the era before European settlement, the Pawnee legend of the Morning Star, frontiersman Wild Bill Hickock and anti-liquor warrior Carrie Nation. As with many of her works, native animals and plants form an animated border.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith discusses her painting “Kansas Stories,” which depicts various periods of Kansas history and the state’s flora and fauna.

One room of Celia’s house is devoted entirely to the works of other artists, people she has met throughout her life — many of them at events like Art in the Park and other gatherings.

“None of this work is mine,” she says of the various sculptures, paintings, ceramics and photos in the room.

It doesn’t need to be said, though, because the pieces, beloved as they are, bear no resemblance to her own or to one another, except that they were created by people who also wanted to go see.

Art in the Park

Celia Smith will be selling her work at this year’s Art in the Park, which is the Lawrence Art Guild’s premier fundraising event. The event will be in South Park from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A commissioned portrait of Dr. Donald Rinsley, a psychiatrist, by Celia Smith

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith’s note to herself in her studio.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A painting by Celia Smith

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A painting by Celia Smith

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith is pictured in her Lawrence studio on Aug. 27, 2025.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Celia Smith’s paintings commonly feature animals — both pets and wild creatures.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The work area in Celia Smith’s studio

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A painting of musicians by Celia Smith

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Animals figure largely in Celia Smith’s paintings.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

A large-scale painting, created by Celia Smith before she came to America, depicts a love story. The plate beneath the painting is a depiction of the fictional Don Quixote.