As any of the 1.4 million people who follow her on Instagram know, she’s an artist to her core.
The book delves deeper into what shaped her.
Smith described to me discovering some Vogue magazines as a child and becoming enchanted by contemporary photography.
She was “shocked, stunned, beguiled. It was a whole new world… I can’t say why a little seven-year old kid was drawn to that, living in a lower middle class area after World War II, but it was a real thing”.
Age nine, struck down with a virus during the Asian flu pandemic, and so ill the doctor says she probably won’t survive, her mother bought her a boxset recording of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly and put it within eyeshot of her bed.
Smith genuinely believes that the desire to listen to it made her get well.
And on the family’s only visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, young Patti slipped off alone to a hall of Picassos and was “smitten”. She had “fallen for art”.
