Deutscher and Hackett

In 1976, Guy Grey-Smith was honoured with a full-scale retrospective at the Art Gallery of Western Australia which then toured to the Queensland Art Gallery before closing in February 1977.¹ Released from the extreme pressure that such events put on an artist, he immediately returned to exploring his home state, as he had done regularly with his family from the late 1950s. Whilst these were formerly done by car and tent, his purchase of a second-hand Cessna aircraft in 1975 opened further horizons, particularly in the far north and north-east. Northern tree, 1978, dates from this period of renewal, viscerally capturing the heat of the land, its unexpected colours and the tenacity of the indigenous plants which grow there. In the early 2010s, the National Australia Bank hung this painting prominently at their Perth headquarters as a statement of intent about the company’s commitment to Western Australia.
 
Grey-Smith was the most influential post-war artist in Western Australia, particularly when considering his teaching, advocacy, mentorship and, importantly, his example as an artist who ensured he was also self-supporting. He studied at London’s Chelsea School of Arts from 1946-47 under Ceri Richards and Henry Moore, both of whom imparted a solid understanding of modernism, informed to a great extent by Roger Fry’s writings and influential exhibitions of post-Impressionist artists that he curated in London before World War I. Like many of his generation, Cézanne was a formative influence on Grey-Smith but he also admired the richness of Eugène Delacroix’s paintings and the audacious colour-shifts used by the Fauves. In 1954, Grey-Smith returned to London where he trained further as a fresco artist, which – like his concurrent ceramics practice – introduced a more tactile approach to his painterly process. Indeed, he was already utilising scrapers and paint bulked up by additives before his exposure to the work of Nicolas de Staël, an artist who also sought to ‘reconcile the modelled image and the flat surface of the painting.’²
 
In Northern tree the confidence of Grey-Smith mature vision is on full display, his artistic equivalent to ‘nature itself which is so strong and so perfect in itself.’³ The deep crimson ground is suggestive of approaching dusk after another heated day in the far-north when the land still swelters with radiant heat; and the blocks of pigment marking the scrapers’ passage echo the sharp edges and dark shadows of the landscape itself. Northern tree was included in what became the artist’s last solo exhibition in Perth before ill-health overtook him, a powerful coda to his local career and revelatory as to the extent of his travels in the prior months during which he visited Mt Magnet and Meekatharra in the mid-west Murchison region, Nullagine in the Pilbara, and a number of sites in the state’s south-west. It is also instructive to compare Grey-Smith’s paintings of the Pilbara with those painted shortly after by Fred Williams, who only flew in then out of the region, unlike Guy’s true immersion. The artist-critic Elwyn Lynn was one to notice the difference, dismissing Williams’ work as being ‘a contest between the grand and the finicky’ when compared to the powerful inland presence of such works as Grey-Smith’s Northern tree.⁴

1. Guy Grey-Smith Retrospective, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 11 November – 12 December, 1976 and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 13 January – 15 February 1977
2. Patrick McCaughey, ‘Art notes: grace and gentility in quiet themes’, The Age, Melbourne, 19 October 1966
3. Guy Grey-Smith, Hazel de Berg interview, 1963, quoted in Harpley, M., Guy Grey-Smith: art as life, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, p. 14
4. Lynn, E., ‘The thrust of Freud’, Weekend Australian, Sydney, 25 June 1988

ANDREW GAYNOR