Greg Voth (architecture '75) is a clean-scrubbed guy from Richmond, wielder of a precise pen, who has lately developed a passion for smearing and spattering his work. Artfully, of course.

Voth, who has been illustrating for the likes of McGraw Hill Publications, Sports Illustrated, and The Washington Post from his New York studio for the past 14 years, found his technique at 1:30 a.m. four years ago while laboring over a Popular Mechanics assignment on the bombing of the World Trade Center.

He had spent hours listening to tapes and reading detectives' reports on the explosion and was particularly interested in how the van containing the explosive looked in the first millisecond after the blast.

"The technique found me," he recalls. With a bottle stopper, he drew in black ink over his water color and smeared it in different directions with a tissue. The explosion roared off the paper.

"The process gripped me immediately," he says. "I began producing abstracts (free-form drawings) daily. They were very spontaneous, very fun. I did them for myself, not for any client."

Voth combines the three mediums that he loves best: pen and ink, watercolor, and pastel. "My technique is more than painting with ink. It has its own heartbeat, its own mind, and I have to go with it," he says.

His smeared and spattered ink imparts motion and texture to everything from gestural abstractions to figurative watercolors, but Voth admits the technique isn't for everyone. "For me, it's as easy as breathing; I'm the kind of person who doesn't like too much pre-planning," he says.

Although Voth lost every client he had when he changed techniques ("I basically became an unknown quantity"), he says he had to keep evolving or die as an artist. "As artists, I believe we always have to be leaders, not followers," he asserts.

Voth refined his artistic standards at Tech's College of Architecture, watching professor Olivio Ferrari destroy his architectural projects.

"Once he marched the whole class outside and made us throw our models into a trash can. Then he smashed them," Voth says. "It makes sense now; Olivio didn't want you to use pieces of an inferior work to design something else."

Voth describes himself as a late bloomer. "I never took art classes in high school. I didn't start drawing seriously until my fourth year of college."

Art was something he took for granted, he says. "My mom was the fashion illustrator all the Richmond department stores called in the 1960s. We grew up around art supplies; Mom was always telling us not to touch them."

Perhaps Voth's artistic perceptions had to simmer 21 years while he developed the patience to execute them. Because of a sight disability -- eyes that work independently of each other -- drawing was a labor, "not a labor of love, just a labor," he says.

"My vision jumps constantly," Voth says, "so detailed work is frustrating -- I keep losing my place. I would get traumatic headaches doing architectural renderings when I was in school."

Voth used his Virginia Tech degree in an architecture job exactly five weeks before he quit. "I didn't think it was fun," he says. After that, he sold his drawings and traded his skills for desk space at a Blacksburg graphics firm for a few months to build up his portfolio. He discovered he loved drawing people and created painstaking pointellistic portraits that took half a week to finish. His new technique, which alludes to detail and is executed in a third the time, was still years away.

In 1975, Voth started working in Roanoke, where his illustrations for the Roanoker magazine were accepted in a book by the National Society of Illustrators. After several years, his portfolio won him a berth to study under the top illustrators in the field for three weeks. "That was when I really started drawing, as opposed to tracing and copying," he says.

By 1980, the accolades were coming in at a steady clip. His first two submissions to the National Society of Illustrators were accepted for publication; his work appeared in Illustrators 22 and he was in two major exhibitions.

"I felt that I was still a novice, but that I was getting some acceptance by the illustrators' community," he says. "My sister, who was already an illustrator working in New York, was urging me to move north, but I wasn't ready. Instead I moved to Richmond to work on some larger jobs for two years."

In 1982, he moved to New York City, "very naive and with a vision." He grabbed his portfolio and began visiting art directors. "That was in the days before fax machines and overnight mail, when you could actually meet art directors," he says. "Now it's a real struggle to see an AD. I've worked on every issue of a magazine for three and a half years and never met the AD in person -- that's not unusual."

Voth made his name in the Big Apple with luminous watercolors for clients such as the League of Women Voters, Amtrak, Natural History magazine, McGraw Hill Publications, and Sports Illustrated. His ink drawings started appearing in the sports section of The Washington Post, where his depictions of a hockey game in triple overtime are particularly well remembered. Sports Illustrated sent him to Boston for the marathon, so that he could feel what it was like to be one of the runners.

But he grew frustrated with watercolors because they "could never really be tamed," he says. "Architects who paint prefer watercolor," he comments wryly. "It's either all planned out or completely spontaneous." Voth found himself redoing work over and over to achieve the desired effects. Often he preferred his first watercolor sketches -- with repetition, their freshness disappeared.

"Judging from Voth's enthusiasm and the response of his clients, he seems to have found his niche," says Despina Metaxatos in a five-page article about Voth for the Dec. '95 American Artist. His new clients have included Nest Egg (a financial publication of IDD Inc.), Medical Economics Publishing Co., Profile Records, the New York Bookbinders' Guild, American Theatre, and numerous legal and financial publications.

His work is in such corporate collections as those of PIA of New England and the National Institutes of Health, as well as in private collections.

"This technique allows me more freedom than I have ever had in doing artwork," he says. "I can bring movement to a piece and breathe life into it. For the first time in doing illustration, I'm actually having fun."

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