Menzies Art Brands

41. JEFFREY SMART 

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Jeffrey Smarts best paintings always have an oddly familiar sense of disquiet. His The Yellow Line of 2007 is one such work.

In its items and atmosphere, the paintings depicted subject matter is both strangely odd and vaguely familiar. Through it one sees afresh that which once barely attracted attention in fact, in Smarts case, so much so that that it is now common to hear the phrase that looks as though it is straight out of a Smart painting or, when driving past a roadside scene, thinking to oneself or saying to others Smart would love that. The uncanny jolt refreshes recognition.

Smart does not aestheticise the ordinary and thereby make it more acceptable he makes the ordinary the subject of his aesthetics in ways that make one consider it anew. Smarts aesthetic impact lies not in his subject matter, but in the way that he makes one ponder upon its emotive effects. Many great artists have this gift: Frederick McCubbin (1855-1917), Arthur Streeton (1867-1943), Fred Williams (1927-1982), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Andrew Wyeth (1917-1992), Howard Arkley (1959-1999) and, of course, Jeffrey Smart eye-openers all of them. Its generally agreed that each of them recalibrated and redefined commonly accepted perceptions of their respective landscapes.

The present painting is a particularly fine example of not only these characteristics, but also it stands as a mature phase (he was eighty-six years old when he created it) silent meditation upon the quizzical oddities of urban life the ubiquitous savage beauty of certain unforeseen outcomes of modern life, as he now and then called it. Always, with Smart, its not the subject matter that matters; its the content that it conveys.

This hallmark painting has an undeniably refined simplicity yet, like a lot of seemingly simple things it rests upon an interrelated series of hidden complexities. Smarts The Yellow Line rewards some visual analysis and it also reveals how he subtly achieved the almost Hitchcockian compression of coolly detached meaning within a compositionally refined scene.

In our Western world we read from the left to the right here, Smart makes the viewers line of sight verge off in the opposite direction: from right to the left. At one stroke, with this one simple compositional device, Smart introduces into the picture plane a destabilising feature that upsets normal expectations. The picture rolls off in an anti-reading direction that works against any narrative-based examination. The viewers mind is made subconsciously aware that this painting is not simply a story-based depiction of a drive through the countryside. It is more like a snatched image almost like a selected frame cut from a film possessing a particular pictorial referent. The referent the thing being denoted is the peculiar way that the painted image is made to show up a telling juxtaposition in observed reality; that reality seen outside the car window, as one speeds by. That is, the oddly inappropriate way that the autostrada (freeway) clashes with humanity. 

It's a depiction of displacement. Its the type of poignant displacement that typifies much that so often comes along with insensitive development, heartless planning and inhospitable progress. What is depicted here is not the seduction of Positano or the picture-postcard breezy charms of the Amalfi coast, rather its the sad prospect thats left to the vast bulk of Italians - the upper central sign that reads Easys Eats (promising, perhaps, something more gastro than gastronomic) adds a touch of wincing humour. Its the bleak contrast of associations that arise from this juxtaposition of pictorial subject matter that charges up the sedate stillness of this seemingly innocuous scene. Strictly speaking, this is not a Surrealist painting but it does use two Surrealist devices: those of displacement and juxtaposition devices that were most probably imbibed from the great Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), whose shadowed and unpeopled urban spaces are faintly echoed in the thought-provoking mood of the present painting.

Considering Smarts The Yellow Line of 2007 in these ways unravels the sophisticated underpinnings and understated content of this highly evocative painting.

All at once, one notices how the left direction of the curve of the yellow line takes one into the painting (an effect aided by the line of receding fence posts) and how thereby the way the freeways sweep takes in the contrasted mass of humanity with its shabby homes, crumpled poignancy and its slightly tatty character almost like a mural of privation and impoverishment. Furthermore, there are no trees in this bracing scene, no soothing shadows, no vegetable gardens, no carports, no happy clouds, no children, no pets and seemingly no hope. To the far right a standing couple lend scale and a sense of distance to a scene that is set on a barren beach. A beach whose only respite of a shadow (probably that of an adjacent raised freeway) is depicted in the lower right its darkness seems to loom over and threaten to engulf the clutch of rudimentary shacks, probably the homes of vacationers or near-by farm labourers. The shadows brooding triangular form balances the sunlit section of the composition and its dark tone matches that of the atmosphere tainting sullen sky that hangs over the upper right of the canvas. A cool note of empathically felt, quizzical tension seeps out of this masterly painting.

Importantly, Smart shows no hint of sneering or of being offended by this decidedly non-bucolic affront to life as it supposedly should be lived in Italy. On the contrary, Smarts painting seems tinted with a kind of compassion if not that, at least a type of understanding. His writings and interviews reveal Smart to be a thoughtful and kindly man whose humanity was expressed dispassionately in a way that nothing to do with any form of preaching or table-thumping outrage.

One senses as much in a painting that is very closely related to The Yellow Line of 2007. Smarts The Caravan Park of the same year shows a similar beach scene whose forlorn arrangement is pinpointed by the bracing of a slightly dilapidated fence in the foreground. The viewers eyes are directed into the composition, more directly than in his The Yellow Line, to highlight the oddity of seeing four all but identical caravans arbitrarily arranged on a featureless beach with their occupants blithely unaware of the apparent absurdity of the situation - save for one who seems to flee the scene. Needless to say, there is nothing quite so strange as this on Australian beaches.

The take-home fact is that both paintings clearly demonstrate the evocative power of Smarts use of the pictorial devices of juxtaposition and displacement. Once again, its not the subject matter that matters; its the content that it conveys. Theres always that head-turning clarity, the wryly-distanced refinement and that double-edged pictorial wit.

All in all, Jeffrey Smarts paintings show remarkable conceptual control and unique technical finesse. He was an aesthete living in the bucolic embrace of country life, presenting the world with his pictorial ruminations on that which is not of country life. In his best paintings he bathed in the ironic clash and relished its aesthetic spark; in these his views were always poignantly piercing and delicately nuanced his The Yellow Line of 2007 is one of those.

 

Literature:

Pearce, B., Jeffrey Smart, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005

Capon, E., Jeffrey Smart Retrospective, Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1999

McDonald, J., Jeffrey Smart: Paintings of the 70s and 80s, Sydney, Craftsman House, 1990

Quartermaine, P., Jeffrey Smart, Melbourne, Gryphon Books, 1983

Smart, J., Not Quite Straight, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1996

 

Associate Professor Ken Wach
Dip. Art; T.T.T.C.; Fellowship RMIT; MA; PhD.
Former Principal Research Fellow and Head,
School of Creative Arts
The University of Melbourne

 

 

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