Technique
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."
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Famous quotes containing the word technique:
“The mere mechanical technique of acting can be taught, but the spirit that is to give life to lifeless forms must be born in a man. No dramatic college can teach its pupils to think or to feel. It is Nature who makes our artists for us, though it may be Art who taught them their right mode of expression.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“In love as in art, good technique helps.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The moment a man begins to talk about technique that’s proof that he is fresh out of ideas.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)