JOHN FIRTH-SMITH Australian, B. 1943

Gavin Wilson, John Firth-Smith: a voyage that never ends, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, illus. pl. 107, p. 182 

John Firth-Smith was born in Melbourne in 1943, spent his childhood in New Zealand and started his formal art education at the Julian Ashton Art School in 1960. A year later, he enrolled at the National Art School in East Sydney to study sculpture and drawing, the latter under John Passmore. Firth-Smith began his career as a figurative painter of yachts on Sydney Harbour, his style becoming increasingly abstract as his art developed. As his recent biographer Gavin Wilson observes, Firth-Smith's imagery is 'figurative, abstract and symbolic'.¹ His art is generally founded in the natural world: the landscape and most especially the sea.

By the 1980s his work was already well represented in Australian public collections. He was a winner of the McCaughey Prize (1975), the Sydney Morning Herald Art Prize (1978) and had received numerous prestigious commissions. Norski, painted in 1987, suggests themes of ocean, wind and moonlight on water (Firth-smith has always been an avid yachtsman). Gavin Wilson comments on the feeling for symmetry, coherence and aura of certainty in the artist’s work at this time. ‘The black vertical bar, bearing the image of an ellipse, seems about to be engulfed in a mass of whirling pigment. In Norski, Firth-Smith’s instincts seem to be directing him towards an enhanced sense of freedom and further painterly adventure’. The ‘exuberent painterliness’ of his style invites a rich diversity of interpretation. ‘On a formal level the paintings are primarily concerned with the expressive, evocative effects of paint as a medium, yet there exists an invigorating sense of freedom, manifesting the painter's spirited rejection of ideology and artistic certitude'. ²

1 See Wilson, G., John Firth-Smith: a voyage that never ends, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 9.
2. Op. cit., pp. 184, 10.