UPDATE: Portland artist Liv Rainey-Smith, one of five nominees for the 2025 World Fantasy Award in the Best Artist category, was named the winner at the 2025 World Fantasy Convention held Oct. 30-Nov. 2 in Brighton, United Kingdom. Winners were named for work published in 2024. See the full list of winners and nominees here.

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Liv Rainey-Smith is the first visual artist from Oregon to qualify as a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in the awards’ fifty-year history. In the universe of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, dark fantasy, horror) that’s about as big as it gets.

Prestige-wise, in this field, there’s the Hugo, the Nebula, maybe the Bram Stoker Awards, and the World Fantasy Awards. Previous nominees/winners for the World Fantasy Award in the artist category include names such as Edward Gorey, Frank Frazetta, Rowena Morrill, and H.R. Giger (the artist who created the xenomorph of Alien fame). In other words, local artist Liv Rainey-Smith has clearly and definitively stepped onto the world stage.  

 Rainey-Smith is a xylographer – she makes woodcuts. She doesn’t make images that look like woodcuts, she doesn’t use computers, she doesn’t use AI, she actually carves wood the old-fashioned way, which is a tradition that goes back at least two thousand years.

Rainey-Smith’s website notes that her process “incorporates a mixture of traditional and modern tools as well as a blend of European and Japanese printmaking techniques.” And you feel that in her work. Her art feels ancient and yet unabashedly original, weird and oddly whimsical, utilizing images and iconography that you seem to remember with your lizard brain, evoking forgotten religions, arcane practices, and uncanny gods and monsters that live beyond the science of human knowledge and just on the other side of a very thin veil. 

Liv Rainey-Smith was born in Utah and grew up all over the West and Midwest. Her father was an electrical engineer, and her mom was a nurse.

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Life wasn’t easy for Rainey-Smith as a child, and that may have contributed to her fascination with the macabre. She had multiple health issues early in her life stemming from nerve damage on the right side of her body, which led to microtia, shaky fine motor skills and a heart defect.

“I had to have open heart surgery at the age of four,” she says. “So, I spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child reading, and fell in love with books.” That love of books would have a significant impact on her life later: “Lots of children’s books,” she says, “are illustrated in black and white or with historic or more modern woodcuts.”

Rainey-Smith also dealt with sleep paralysis for much of her life, a frightening phenomenon in which sleepers wake but find they can’t move. “It was scary stuff,” she says. “I was a child of the ’80s; alien abduction was in the media and that was the only thing that fit in with what I was experiencing.” 

Rainey-Smith tells another story of how, when she was very young, she came across an article in a magazine that had a profound impact on her: “I have a 1982 or ‘83 copy of National Geographic that featured an article about the Aztecs that I glommed onto because that was before my heart surgery, and I knew I was going to have heart surgery, and there was an illustration in it of someone having their chest cut open and their heart taken out.  I related to that.”

These experiences had a profound impact on her personal and artistic sensibilities.

“I was very weird as a kid,” she says. “I loved monsters. Collected bones. We lived in the desert. You would find jawbones and stuff like that. One of my earliest memories is waking up with a weight on my chest and something pulling the blanket over my face down and finding myself face to face with a – well, it reminded me of brains. It had a face, but it was slimy and wrinkled and horrible-looking. That’s my earliest memory; a night hag encounter.”

In spite, or perhaps because of her trials as a child, Rainey-Smith gravitated to art as her outlet. “I’ve always felt the need to create,” she says. “It’s just an impulse that’s always been there and had to be expressed in one way or another.”

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As a young adult, Rainey-Smith settled in Oregon, getting her BFA at the Oregon College of Art and Craft in 2008. Initially she was studying to be a metalsmith.

“I’ve loved jewelry and gems since I was a child.” she says, “So, that was actually my goal when I went to school. I tried a printmaking survey course because part of the requirement in the BFA program was different crafts, and I fell in love with woodcuts. I love things that really require me to get my hands into them. I think it’s the nerve damage thing. I don’t have the finest motor control on my dominant hand, so I don’t feel very confident with a pencil or a brush and a light touch. But if it’s something that I need to physically work a little harder that works better for me.”

Over the years, Rainey-Smith developed a process that helps sustain her ability to do her art even with her physical limitations.

“I’ve had to learn how to manage my body while making art,” she says. “When I’m carving, the world gets narrowed down to the wood that I’m cutting. It’s easy to lose track of time. But I’ve learned that there’s a hard limit. If I try to carve a full six hours in a day, even if it’s broken up, that’s on the end of too much. I try to avoid injuring myself. I’d rather do four hours, or a little more, a day, steadily, than push to do a long day and then have to take a couple of days off. I try not to carve for more than an hour at a time. The best thing I’ve found for woodcut is, I listen to podcasts. And that gives me a thirty-minute to an hour frame and clues me into the fact that I need to stop, get up, stretch, do a few things.”

At the locus where her aptitude for art encountered her predilection for the paranormal, Rainey-Smith’s art found its voice, and her career found a foothold. Early on, Rainey-Smith started selling her work on Etsy. To this day, this is still her primary means making her living.

Two works that she included in her thesis found their way onto the TV show Portlandia (Season 2, episode 7). She became a professional member of Print Arts Northwest in 2010. And at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival she found both a market and a community. 

“Getting involved in the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival almost twenty years ago got me into a network that’s grown and developed over the years,” Rainey-Smith says. “I don’t think I would’ve been involved with the books I’ve done if it weren’t for that.” Those connections eventually led to being invited to show her work at the Esoteric Conference, in Seattle, and that connected her with her first publisher. 

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Since then her work has appeared in a variety of books including, among others, Michael Howard’s Children of Cain: A Study of Modern Traditional Witches and Robert Fitzgerald’s Arcanum Bestiarum, a truly epic undertaking for which Rainey-Smith contributed fifty-five original woodcuts. 

This achievement is even more remarkable when it’s taken into consideration that, by her own admission, Rainey-Smith is not a fast artist. “Woodcut is slow,” she says. “I get a fair amount of contacts that are like, ‘We need a cover in three weeks.’ And I’m like, ‘Go find someone else.’” 

Enter Nate Pedersen. Pedersen is a nonfiction author, historian and Lovecraftian anthologist. He was producing a work he called The Starry Wisdom Library: The Catalogue of the Greatest Occult Book Auction of All Time. The title is a reference to Lovecraft’s Church of Starry Wisdom concept that appeared in his story The Haunter of the Dark.

Pedersen’s book, as its title implies, is a fictional catalogue of an imaginary auction of various texts and art pieces that supposedly illuminate myriad dark corners of the Lovecraftian mythos. Pedersen contacted Rainey-Smith about contributing six woodcuts to make up one of the entries in the book. 

Starry Wisdom Library  was well-received critically, and seven years later, when Pedersen decided to make a followup, he once again reached out to Rainey-Smith to contribute. The Dagon Collection takes place some forty years after the first book, soon after the events of Lovecraft’s short story Shadow Over Innsmouth, and is also a fictional catalogue.  

“The concept with The Dagon Collection,” explains Rainey-Smith, “is that after the FBI raid in The Shadow Over Innsmouth they’re selling off the strange things they acquired there. Nate asked me to do a collection of prints as one of the items that was found and sold.

“I was working on a different book at the time, so I didn’t have a lot of extra time. We talked about it, and I picked five artworks that I’ve made in the past and I made a new woodcut as well for it. I’ve written an entry about each print as if I’m an expert writing about these prints of an unknown artist and I’m speculating as to who is the artist, what they were doing, who they might have been and, of course, they’re all themed on Innsmouth.” 

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Which, being Lovecraft, it’s not going to be your everyday theme. “The whole thing about Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Rainey-Smith says with apparent delight, “is that humans are breeding with the fish people. That’s part of the deal. You take the Third Oath of Dagon, and you have to get yourself a husband or a wife that’s a little fishy.” 

Rainey-Smith was at the doctor’s office for her mother when she got the news about the World Fantasy Award Finalist nod.

“I was in the office waiting for [my mom] when I saw a message from my husband that I thought was about the book being a finalist — but it read a little weird. So, I looked at the website and further down, there I was in the artist category, which was completely unexpected. Some of the artists I grew up on have been finalists or won this award. When I looked up that list of past nominees and it’s like, Edward Gorey. Michael Whelan — wow. I fell in love with their work when I was in elementary school.”

The other four finalists in this year’s Artist category are Jenni Coutts, Nico Delort, Manzi Jackson, and Tran Nguyen.

Liv Rainey-Smith’s hard work, dedication and commitment to her weird roots has led to her being mentioned alongside artists she has admired since her childhood, artists that have altered a culture. Could she ever have expected that? 

“I just kinda have my little studio and I make stuff,” she says, shaking her head, “and when people notice I’m like, ‘Wait — what?’ I know. I’m a professional artist. I have deliberately developed this career because it’s what I feel like I have to do to be able to keep making art, but it still surprises me.” 

Portland-based xylographer Liv Rainey-Smith is now, officially, a world-class artist.  

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