Jeffrey Smart

Jeffrey Smart (born 1921 in Adelaide), is an expatriate Australian painter, who is known for his modernist depictions of urban landscapes.
His first goal was to become an architect; however, he went on to become an art teacher after studying at Adelaide Teacher's College and the South Australian School of Art and Crafts. Smart taught art in schools for the South Australian Education Department from 1942 - 1947. During this time he also acknowledged his own homosexuality.
He later studied in Paris with Fernand Léger as well as at La Grande Chaumière. He began exhibiting frequently in 1957. In 1965 he moved to Italy and bought the house where he still resides, Posticcia Nuova, near Arezzo in 1971. His autobiography, "Not Quite Straight" was published in 1996. A major retrospective of his works travelled around Australian art galleries from 1999.
Smart is one of Australia’s best known artists with his almost iconic and unique imagery, heavily influenced from various artists and art forms alike. Even though Smart is not a prolific painter, his artworks are internationally recognised and highly acclaimed. His stark portrayals of contemporary life, both realistic and absurd, have been the basis of many artistic discussions. Critics and admirers of Smart's paintings often debate his subject matter, and whenever questioned in interview, Smart side-tracks the topic of subject matter to his style; "Leaving the interpretation as the prerogative of the individual viewer." Smart states that he “paints a picture because he likes the shape”, and when asked why his skies are always so gloomy and smog-laden or why his faces never wear a smile, he claims "I need a dark sky for the composition, because pale blue at the top of a frame looks nothing… [and] because a smiling face is too hard to paint".
Smart is the least romantic of artists and his paintings are notorious for encompassing lonely urban vistas that seem both disturbing and threatening. Isolated individuals seem lost in industrial wastelands, full of high rise construction, concrete street-scapes and an eerie feeling of harmony and equilibrium – where silence and stillness create a deathly ambience. ‘The express rape of the landscape’ is one title hanging over Smart’s paintings, referring to the freeways, street signs, trucks, oil drums, containers, buildings, concrete dividers… that are so ever present in his works. Yet his paintings – full of bold colours and perfect symmetry are beautiful; and the repetition of road signs in his works, inconclusive of where they are pointing to, seem tantalising. Figures are also present in many of Smart’s paintings, which are said to be “impassive observers, reconciled to the contemporary state of things, prepared to accommodate themselves to an increasingly impersonal environment” or as “statements on the dehumanising conformity of modern architecture and social painting”, but Smart contradicts: “The truth is I put figures in mainly for scale…” It is Smarts precise and unequalled attention to clean lines, composition and geometrics that make his eye-catching paintings stand-out ‘in the story of modern Australian art’. “The subject matter is only the hinge that opens the door, the hook on which hangs a coat. My only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places. It is always the geometry”.
It was under tutorship lessons with the modernist artist, Dorrit Black, that Smart acquainted himself with the ‘Golden Mean’. Also referred to as ‘the divine proportion’, used in ancient Greek architecture the golden mean is a geometric proportion in a composition, used in many works of art and architecture; the ratio of which is approximately 1:1.618. This complex network of interlocking rectangles, triangles and diagonal lines, is used to calculate the structure of Smart’s paintings, which form the basis of all his artworks. For Jeffrey Smart, geometry and precision of the composition is the key to successful art, much like how comedic timing is the key to the effectiveness of a punch line. “Todays most prevalent myth is that Smart’s work has no content: that everything is a compositional exercise devoted to capturing a formal ideal of beauty”.
Jeffrey Smart regards being able to draw the human being as the single most important attainment of any artist. When asked why none of the people in his pictures are ever painted smiling, he has said that he can not draw smiles well. Unlike many primarily landscape artists he can paint both the human form and the human face, as can be seen in his self portrait work. He regards abstract painters as people who have never learnt to draw. Smart mostly paints with oil, acrylic and watercolours, generally using the bold primary colours – yellow, blue and red – and dark greys for his skies. This creates an unusual effect in his works as the foregrounds of his paintings are fully lit despite the dark sky. His style of painting is a long and arduous one, resulting in barely a dozen finished canvases a year. “I always do a lot of preliminary drawings, moving the forms, the shadows, the buildings the figures around the canvas till I get that perfect composition…”
Much of Smart’s direct artistic stimulation comes from, literally, a passing glance as he is driving: “…my paintings have their origins in a passing glance…”. “Sometimes I’ll drive around for months…despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me: a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the gem of a picture”.