Way back, in year 10 Art, we did a project on an Australian painter and I chose Jeffrey Smart. This was the beginning of a long love affair with his work.
He has been my favourite artist for 20 years now and on June 20 this year Jeffrey passed away at the age of 91 in Italy near the town of Arezzo.
Jeffrey was such an inspiration in my life and I have many of his prints adorning my walls at home.
Jeffrey was born in Adelaide in 1921 and trained at the South Australian School of Art between 1937 and 1941 and later at the Academe Montmartre with painter Fernand Leger in Paris in 1949.
Jeffrey was the art critic for The Daily Telegraph in Sydney from 1952 to 1954 and was awarded the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1951. He was the drawing teacher at the National Art School, Sydney from 1962 to 1963, before moving to Italy in 1964.
His works have been included in international group exhibitions at the Whitechapel and the Tate, in London. In 1999 the Art Gallery of New South Wales held a major retrospective of his work.
I have been lucky enough to see three exhibitions of his work:
The Jeffrey Smart Retrospective Exhibition - Art Gallery of South Australia 1999
Jeffrey Smart: The question of portraiture - Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery 2009
Jeffrey Smart: The question of portraiture - Mornington Peninsular Regional Gallery 2009
Master of Stillness - Tarrawarra 2012
Jeffrey's style has been described as both surrealism and precisionism although he did disagree with the surrealist label saying that it was the modern urban landscape that was surreal and he was just painting it.
To me his work captured the urban landscape and industrial buildings by celebrating their colour and grandeur. The people he painted in these scenes give a human quality to the painting which is intriguing. The people in his paintings were often friends such as Clive James and Germaine Greer.
It is with great sadness that I write this blog as I was never able to meet my hero. I will celebrate though because Jeffrey Smart left his mark on the world and it is a much better and more beautiful place for it. We are so lucky that he had such a long life and his enjoyment for painting stayed with him until the end.
Jeffrey Smart is my legend and one day I hope that I will have enough money to purchase an original!
No comments:
Post a Comment