Page 40 - Studio International - April 1965

1 2 3 4 5
Oceanair, 1964
Inside and Outside: Roundabout Floating No. 3, 1964 Inside and Outside No. 3. 1964 Inside and Outside, 1964
No. 2, 1964 Oil on Canvas 42 x 42 in. Oil on Canvas Oil on Canvas
54 x 54 in.
Oil on Canvas 42 x 42 in. 36 x 36 in.
48 x 48 in.
aware of the great Dutchman's personality. 'Personality",
he says, 'is not the reason for painting. Art only takes
place when the identity of the artist is forgotten, when
something else takes over, when anxiety disappears'.
From what might be termed the paintings of 'Light
and Silence' in the late fifties, he gradually moved
towards 'Movement and Sound'. The second Mat-
thiesen exhibition in 1963 included titles like Light
Movement, Sea Movement and Reliefs described as
First and Second Movement or Four Movements. The
latter are of great significance since the painted reliefs
and free-standing sculpture were efforts to free himself
from the desire to paint three-dimensionally or create
space. The reference to 'movements' was a conscious
search for the purity and diversity of music. Whilst not
derived from music, the attempt to suggest the clarity
of Vivaldi or the syncopation of Bach was an effort to
compose a painting of different moods 'separated like
the ingredients of a sandwich'. Similarly Sea Diagrams
of 1962, twelve small panels on a large board, each
contained a different "metaphor' for the sound and
movement of the sea, separated, isolated, yet intended
as a collective image of experience.
It is from these experiments that Smith's latest, and in
my view more successful work, emanates.
'I think of my painting as diagrams of an experience or
sensation. The subject is very important; the sound of
the subject, its noise or its silence, its intervals and its
activity. When I talk of the sound of music in the sub-
ject I'm not always thinking in terms of a symphony,
but groups of single notes. The closer the painting is
to a diagram or graph, the nearer it is to my intention. I
like every mark to establish a fact in the most precise
economical way'.
As Smith says, subject is important to him. The new
paintings have quite definite origins—Music, Fair-
grounds and Roundabouts, Sea and Aeroplanes, objects
or activities which involve sound and movement. The
paintings themselves fall into different stylistic cate-
gories. One group, large square canvases, bear dozens
of tiny hieroglyphic figures, vaguely like numerals or
cubist sections of realistic objects, but in fact with no
direct connotation. They are like irregular jigsaw
Darts and even reminded me of the technique of
the American writer William Burroughs, who cuts up a
manuscript and irrationally fits sentences and para-
graphs together.
These forms represent a reaction from the isolation of
single images. 'I want a painting to contain thousands
of experiences and images. So much contemporary
art is concerned with one statement—it bores me to
tears. After all, a painting starts from a thousand things.
My paintings of musical notation are also paintings of
an activity. In trying to deal with sound I try to give a
visual equivalent of sound—harmonies, discords,
pauses'.
The group based on Fairgrounds and Roundabouts
seek to reflect 'a cacophony of sound and movement'.
This subject has long attracted Smith ; indeed his first
exhibition at the Beaux Arts included a picture entitled
Roundabout Horses. ('It makes one wonder', he re-
marked, 'whether in all of us there is only one subject
which we paint again and again in different ways'—a
reflection most apropos for Smith). For these paintings
he actually makes sketches at Fairgrounds and the
seemingly obtuse elements are derived from careful
notes. The canvas is divided into squares and rectangles,
dividing off activities and experiences. The result is a