Restoration
by Freida Theant

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - July - August 2015

Her dripping skin streams off the rinse water in silvery rivulets.

Deliciously naked she stands up from her Jacuzzi, splashing the almost-drained bathwater with her feet. For half an hour, Ingrid has been steeping in the fluid massages of the Jacuzzi’s hydrotherapy. Reluctantly she rose from her steamy refuge; needing to dry off and get dressed.

Smoking Virtuoso
by Freida Theant

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - March - April 2014

When the famed violinist Dalila lights up, she turns the heads of concert-goers who flee outdoors during intermissions at Severance Hall, Cleveland. They are agog at how she enjoys a smoky duet with her Dunhill Black. One observer remarks “she deserves the title ‘smoking virtuoso’ bringing her gold Yves St Laurent lighter up to her cigarette to bestow it with life, and thus entwine with her in a glowing, smoky creation, flowing together”.

Kissing My Friend
by Freida Theant

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - September - October 2011

The public knows me as a prize-winning artist, invited to interviews for magazines and talk shows, but that’s far from how I started out.

But first, understand this: women enchant me when they light their cigarettes, when they expel their chalky, membrane-thin sheets from moist, barely spaced lips, and when they concave their cheeks and make taut their mouth around a slightly staining filter tip during a hungry pull. On those increasingly rare occasions where I happen across feminine smoking, I pause and watch them, transfixed. The memories of her smoky immersion, her cloudy delights of nasal and oral joy compel me afterwards to capture it on canvas and paper. But for years I felt that images of this kind were not to be shared. They aren’t Art and they certainly aren’t marketable.

Until That Day
by Freida Theant

SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - May - June 2013

For today’s special event, Leslie drives to Countywide Community College for today’s open air seminar dressed as ‘the woman in-touch with nature’; the theme-appropriate look for the topics under discussion: ‘inner awareness and consciousness raising’. She brushed her shoulder-length brunette hair arrow-straight with only a few fly-away strands. Her green eyes are overarched with chestnut hue eyebrows plucked to a thin, long comet shape. Leslie’s loose and open black dress off-sets her fire-engine red nails to perfection. Her muted mauve lipstick actually diminishes her deliciously full lips.