JOHN FIRTH-SMITH

Australian Art Investment Trust, Melbourne (no. 0185) (label on reverse)
Private collection, Singapore; purchased from the above in 2000

Extensive drying cracks in central black area have been consolidated by recent restoration and is now stable. There are no visible defects. Work is on original stretcher and has not been lined.
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In Open, John Firth-Smith shows once again his gifted ability to use the horizontal format in an almost infinite variety of ways to produce paintings that are eminently to do with painting. One senses the drag and pull of paint across surfaces, tooled and brushed colours, textured and vibrant with under paint. While the picture plane reigns supreme, spatial illusions of depth harmonise with others that seem to reach out into the viewer's world. Firth-Smith is, as this work shows, a gifted abstract artist. The frequent absence of any exact verisimilitude in form or figuration, however, does not deny his close association with the natural world. It is merely that his vision is not of those whose clearly defined aspects of nature place trees and hills in settings contrived by the rules of one-point perspective and the like. Firth-Smith prefers intangibles such as atmosphere and recollection, especially when associated with Sydney Harbour and his love of things maritime. The key is often in the titles - The Eye of the Storm, 1985 and Returning on Time, 1986, and the vast and majestic panorama, Returning on Time (1985, Art Gallery of New South Wales). He echoes rather than repeats nature.

As in Open, the ellipse is common to many of his works, twice repeated in Returning on Time. In the The Eye of the Storm it evolves out of a long line of attachment, suggestive that the ellipse, like so many of his 'abstract' motifs, has its genesis in things to do with boats and the sea - a line or rope, sometimes attached to an elliptical bollard or cleat. His biographer, Gavin Wilson, put it this way:

'Throughout the 1980s, Firth-Smith's sustained engagement with the sea and maritime world produced a body of work that was remarkable for both its quality and scope. Through his masterly manipulation of paint, taut or curvilinear lines would evolve from the vast formats and swathes of pigment into poetic passages of a virtually unprecedented abstract intensity.' ¹

1. Gavin Wilson, John Firth-Smith: A Voyage That Never Ends, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p. 126