Or do we already get his deadpan conundrums and expect there must be more?Jeffrey Smart was an extremely well-travelled artist. I have to stop and record that inspirational flash immediately, or I might lose it. “Today’s 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 has 3 jobs listed on their profile. There are, of course, occasions when we shouldn’t trust an artist’s spoken introspection; many feel uncomfortable talking about their work and will offer awkward and forced snippets.
A shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows, and I send up a prayer because I now have the germ of a picture. An interest in architecture took Smart to Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Italy and Yemen. The Two Up Game (Portrait of Ermes De Zan)
“As my technique grew, I found I could paint those things I liked looking at, those slum streets behind the city apartments”. Sometimes it’s a feeling about a certain place or area of Rome or Florence, or the country where there’s a garage. Jeffrey Smart - The Bicycle Race III thoughtcollections: “ The Bicycle Race III (1967) (I saw this nearly a year ago, at USyd’s gallery, it’s now one of my favourites). The golden mean is a geometric proportion, the ratio of which is approximately 1:1.618.There is a ‘separateness’ about the figures as though they exist in their own worlds and the painting does not hint at any deeper connection between them. Predictable colours that jump out from inky half-tones or variations in beige look more like a languid routine at work where any sense of invention dissipates as he reaches into his formalist box of tricks. He resided there with his partner until his death.He also attended the Académie Montmatre where for a time he worked under the famous French artist Fernand Léger (1881-1955), whose highly accomplished painting China Town of 1943, was successfully auctioned by Menzies in June 2015.The primacy of drawing: that’s something Smart would agree with. When asked why none of the people in his pictures are ever painted smiling, he said that he could not draw smiles well. Others have cast him as a realist, hyper-realist, ‘off-beat classicalist’ and a metaphysical painter. But this colour, that shape – signs, arrows, road lines – it’s obvious and stiff, like a new realist academician going through his paces.Smart is one of Australia’s best known artists with his almost iconic and unique imagery, heavily influenced by various artists and art forms. His paintings are lonely urban vistas that seem disturbing and threatening, isolated individuals that seem lost, and the repetition of road signs. A major retrospective of his works travelled around Australian art galleries 1999–2000.‘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 and concrete dividers that are the ever-present subjects of his work. The repetition of road signs in his works, for example, suggest an inconclusive direction and a world outside the frame is tantalising suggested.Piero della Francesca, a Renaissance painter and mathematician, was one of classical influences on Smart’s work. Smart’s direction was set. We are adding to the site continually so if you are looking for something in particular…

Jeffrey Smart was an Australian painter known for his detailed paintings of urban landscapes. These vignettes are stylistic affectations, right down to the deliberately sketchy borders, which have been painted to mark them as studies, to suggest a certain pause before the artist abandons them and moves on to bigger things: Old Master pretentiousness, a nod to the greatness of others.Five years later, in 1944, Smart held his first solo exhibition at Kozminsky’s, the famous Melbourne institution. Just such poetic sentiments underlie the pensive sensations found in Smart’s paintings. Thake’s paintings, including his surrealist-like imagery as a war artist, reveal a keen and inventive eye and distinctive imagination. Juli 1921 in Adelaide; † 20. Jeffrey Smart, who has died aged 91, was one of Australia’s foremost post-war artists, specialising in beautifully composed urban landscapes stripped of …

His compositions were always consciously arranged and then constantly rearranged until they achieve the balanced pictorial structure and ‘open-ended’ ambience that characterise all his major paintings, such as Near Pisa of 1995.In Smart’s paintings there is that same sense of seeing the world through the artist’s eyes. The later pencil-of-darkness works with their scratchy forms seem consumed by the frustration of an architect with design block. After a successful exhibition in London, he bought a rural property called “Posticcia Nuova” near Arezzo in Tuscany. It’s too often subject to uncritical esteem. We accept changes and miraculous discoveries without wonder – as Vermeer handled a white jug; but man has changed little in thousands of years in his need for art, even for mysticism. Despair: nothing, nothing. The painting has been held in the one private collection since its original acquisition and exhibited in both Sydney and London.