The urban transformer

JEFFREY Smart was the most important contemporary painter in this country - and an example of how to be a great artist.

Jeffrey Smart

JEFFREY Smart, who has died a little over a month before his 92nd birthday, was not only a great Australian artist - perhaps the most important contemporary painter in this country - but an example of how to be a great artist.

Early in his life he had to struggle against the then dominant fashion for abstraction, but he had the courage to follow his instinct for what he felt to be real and significant.

He left this country partly to get away from the inbred Australian art scene and find an environment where he would be free to pursue his inspiration and patiently develop his own unique imaginative world.

That world was drawn from the barren setting of modern urban life, an environment composed of freeways, trucks and containers, and horizons filled with anonymous apartment blocks. But it was not a straightforward picture of bleakness and alienation - he always refused to be drawn on questioning along these lines - for he also worked hard to transform these subjects, through the meticulous use of compositional form, into images of stillness and aesthetic harmony.

His pictures acknowledge an inhumane world and yet display it to our view with a philosopher's equanimity.

Christopher Allen is the author of Jeffrey Smart, Paintings and Drawings 2004-2006 (2007).