Artist by Vocation - Eric Smith
- Paul McGillick
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
The following is the text of a talk I gave on June 18 th , 2025 at the
Macquarie University Art Gallery in Sydney to launch the
exhibition: Eric Smith – The Metaphysics of Paint
Let me say at the outset, notwithstanding my advanced years, that I never met Eric Smith. And despite writing a little catalogue essay for this show, I certainly don’t profess to have any special qualification for talking about his work – although I will say this exhibition is an important, indeed long overdue, retrospective look at an artist who made an outstanding
contribution to modern Australian painting.
If he were here tonight, I suspect he would feel more than a little uncomfortable with me saying that. In fact, he might feel uncomfortable with this exhibition being put on in the first place. Because over the last 28 years of his life, Eric Smith had just one solo exhibition. I can think of a number of reasons why this might have been the case, but one in particular suggests itself – a certain dissatisfaction with how the work was going. Eric Smith was nothing if not self-critical.
Indeed, he was so self-critical that it’s amazing that he ever exhibited at all. As I point out in my catalogue essay, he told James Gleeson in 1979 (as part of Gleeson’s series of archival interviews for the National Gallery of Australia) that he thought his work had started going off beam as early as the famous Direction 1 exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney in 1956 – in other words, basically from the beginning of his career.
But Eric Smith was a slippery customer. He never painted the same picture twice, no matter how successful either he or others thought earlier work might have been. And, as we all know, it is irresistably tempting to repeat a winning formula. As Oscar Wilde said: “I can resist everything except temptation.”
Well, if Eric Smith was ever tempted to repeat a painting that had been successful, it would have been a rare lapse because he was anything but a slave of fashion – not even to his own fashion. And given his extraordinary success over some years in the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize, the Sulman Prize and the Blake Prize for religious art – all prizes which he won multiple times – it must have felt tempting to figure out what the winning formula was and to repeat it, especially as he often seemed to be concerned less with the kudos those prizes brought than with the fact that they helped pay the bills.
It seems to me – and here I am trying to channel Eric Smith, never (as I said) having met him, and given the dearth of published discussion of his work…I mean, to digress briefly, even in the archival interviews with Gleeson and Hazel de Berg he seems to be always laying down smoke screens rather than revealing his deepest motivations and preoccupations. Like I say, he’s a slippery customer.
But it seems to me that he must have had an inbuilt mechanism which simply made it impossible for him to repeat something he had already done. Every painting had to have its own integrity, its own special reason to come into being.
In my catalogue essay I paraphrase the great American architect, Louis Kahn, who said that every building – or space – had to discover what it wanted to be. For Eric Smith, every painting had to discover what it wanted to be. It wasn’t enough to be a repetition of what had been done before – either by himself or someone else – and certainly genres such as abstraction or figuration, portraiture or religious art were beside the point for Smith. Indeed, every painting had to be a unique and spontaneous act of the imagination and an exploration of the materials used. He tried doing preliminary sketches, but effectively abandoned the practice. The point for him was painting. Painting was what he did.
Still channeling him, I am reminded of an anecdote concerning the great Danish furniture designer, Paul Kjaerholm. Asked about how a chair design he had been working on for years was progressing and whether he had finished it yet, Kjaerholm replied: “It’s getting there”. You see, Kjaerholm was trying to design the perfect chair. And I wonder whether in some way Eric Smith was always trying to paint the perfect picture. If so, why indeed exhibit, since by his own standards no picture would ever be good enough.
Genres like portraiture, religion and landscape were simply the occasion of a painting. They were not what the painting was all about. Going back to my catalogue essay I draw a distinction there between an artist-by-career and an artist-by-vocation. If you are an artist by career, you say “I am an artist”. But if art is a vocation, then you say, “art is what I do”. Eric Smith was an artist by vocation.
In fact, he came from a generation of artists to whom it would never have occurred to say “I am an artist”. They might say I am a painter, or a sculptor or a printmaker, but to say “I am an artist” would have been meaningless. It’s worth remembering here that Piet Mondrian, an artist whom Smith admired, always dressed in a suit and tie – because he said he didn’t want to look like an artist!
As for career…well, Smith seemed to do everything he could to make sure he never had a career. He sniffed out quite early that chasing a career quickly snuffed out the art. The art became a commodity, a mere accoutrement of social activity. It lost its reason for coming into being. A far cry from today, may I say, when so many are so quick to don the priestly garb of the artist, but when asked what they actually do, find it hard to explain. So, they mutter, “Well, you know, I’m an artist”. Enough said.
These are the bearers of revealed truth with a mandate to preach that truth to the unenlightened.
But Eric Smith was cut from a very different cloth. Like many of his generation, he brought to his work a certain humility. And, I would say, a sense of uncertainty which, I would suggest, comes through in Smith’s early religious paintings of Christ’s Passion and in the words: “Father, father why hast thou forsaken me?”
If there is a single, most important characteristic of modern art – which is to say, from the Post-Impressionists on – it is uncertainty. How do we know the world? And given that 70% of what we know is said to come from the visual faculty, what is the nature of sight? How much of what we see is a construction? Is pure vision even possible? Most importantly for Eric Smith, when does sight become vision, or insight?
Julius Caesar reputedly said: “I came, I saw, I conquered.” But Eric Smith found it hard to get past the seeing bit. How do we see? What kind of knowledge comes with seeing? In the end, painting was a kind of laboratory where we learn to see. The painter’s job was to offer visual puzzles. These puzzles are never really solved. But in trying to solve them, we not only enhance the quality of our visual perception, but somehow see the world and – to paraphrase T.S. Eliot – to know it for the first time.
This is summed up in the many portraits Eric Smith painted over a long life. The fact that he avoided commissioned portraits – preferring to choose his own subjects – tells us something about his motivation. For him a portrait was first and foremost a painting – the likeness was certainly a consideration, but it was a secondary consideration.
To make my point, allow me to quote comments he made to the art critic, Laurie Thomas, way back in 1969:
“I don’t know why, if I’m painting a man in the landscape, it has to be a particular man. I’m interested in individuals. I’ve got this thing about painting particular people. The problem is whether your feeling for the people is greater than your feeling for art.
You want to make it intensely them. But which way do you do it? Photographically? Or in some way to give it a certain detachment, to integrate the figure into the landscape?
There are two ways. One is to give it a heightened reality. The other is more abstract – a painting first and a portrait after.
To combine them both – that would be it – to paint an intensely real portrait and, at the same time, to have the other thing, to have a man integrated into the structure: a whole understanding, insight into life.”
Another clue to where he was coming from can be found in various remarks he made about the art that excited him. For example, following his first trip to Europe in 1963 as a result of winning the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship. In these comments he makes no distinction between the genres – such as abstraction and figuration, contemporary or otherwise: it was all painting and all driven by the same values and aspirations. He mentions Mondrian and Velásquez in the same breath. For him each is a revelation in their own way. What he takes away is something essential – beyond surface and beyond style. Something that opens our eyes to an inner vision.
Hence, in the portraits, his imaginative pictorial organisation and energised surface lead us beyond superficial recognition to a richer perception of the subject. In the landscapes, he makes sure we have to struggle to distinguish between the depiction of what we know to be a landscape and an abstraction of that landscape in which colour and form take over from our preconceptions.
So, let me conclude these brief remarks by repeating how welcome it is to have this exhibition give us, as it does, the opportunity to re-visit the work of an important Australian painter. But to add that it also provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the true purpose of painting – at a time when the babble of opinion and prejudice can so easily blind us to the real reason we happen to be alive and walking on this planet.
Allow me to indulge in two final quotes which I think go to the heart of Eric Smith’s long journey. Firstly, the full version of the Eliot quote from earlier, from the Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And secondly, from Marcel Proust:
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes.”
The exhibition runs until August 1st, 2025.
