
Artist Jeffrey Smart takes the audience on a whimsical visit to an industrial landscape where he set a painting featuring bicycle riders. Smart asks the film’s director where he would put the figure of Smart in the painting. Smart also suggests that music might set the scene. Summary by Damien Parer.
Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide in 1921 and, like many of his contemporaries, went overseas to work. He began exhibiting regularly in 1957 and has held 25 solo exhibitions. His work is known for its stark industrial landscapes with lone figures. Producer Don Featherstone has made many documentaries about Australian artists. He is also the producer of Beautiful Lies, The Daylight Moon, An Imaginary Life and The Beach.
Australian artist Jeffrey Smart has been living in Italy since the 1970s. This documentary looks at his life in the 1990s. He reflects on his life as a painter and offers observations about his artistic work. The film features footage from his home in Italy and whimsical visits to local sites seen in his work.
Notes by Damien Parer
This clip shows artist Jeffrey Smart describing his approach to painting. It combines shots of the urban landscape that Smart paints with examples of his work. The artist explains that he is inspired by the way light falls on an object, rather than by the object itself, and that he sees and celebrates beauty in urban landscapes. In the final sequence Smart stands next to a car ramp and explains how he might paint it. In a playful reference to Smart’s use of figures in his paintings, Smart himself is placed in a variety of different places in the scene. At Smart’s on-camera suggestion, orchestral music is introduced and images of an orchestra, various shots of the ramp and the finished painting are shown.
Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia
Jeffrey Smart shows the filmmaker industrial sites that are reflected in his works. This is intercut with a studio interview and images of the paintings.
Jeffrey Smart, artist I can find anything beautiful. Always it’s the light, always it’s the light, I think. I don’t think it’s the object in itself, it’s the way it occurs naturally. Even ugly things or so-called – what you call ugly things – can be beautiful. If a painter’s not concerned with whatever he thinks is beautiful, there’s no point in him painting, is there? I think it’s what the Chinese say – if you are to move others, you must first of all be moved yourself – must be moved and, usually, when I paint it’s to paint something that I’ve thought absolutely so beautiful that I want to celebrate it – I want to put it down.
Jeffrey points to a bridge.
Jeffrey Smart Well, I think if I painted it, I’d not use those lights that you see there. I’d more likely use these lights, d’you see? But I think the lights that go like this take up the theme of the turning of the ramp. Now, earlier in the day the sun – or more in winter – the sun strikes those walls. You see the way the light’s on those columns looks very dramatic – very, very lovely shapes. At this point the music could be swelling up.
The clip cuts to an orchestra playing and Jeffrey is shown, in snap edits, standing in various positions underneath the bridge. Details of Jeremy’s painting and of the site that inspired are shown before we see the entire painting of the bridge.
Jeffrey Smart Where do you want me now? Over there? Up here? You want me to look at the back of my car? What a nice car. Do you want me to say cheese or biscuits?
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.