Jeffrey Smart - Influences and Artistic Style

Influences and Artistic Style

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. 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… 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 Smart's 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 golden ratio', 'the divine proportion', 'the mean of Phidias' and a number of other names, it has been used since ancient Greek times in many works of art and architecture. The golden mean is a geometric proportion, 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".