Jeffrey Smart
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“I find myself moved by man in his new violent environment. I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully.”
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Jeffrey Smart (1921–2013) was an Australian modernist painter renowned for his precise, geometrically structured depictions of urban and industrial environments. Born in Adelaide, he studied art from an early age before working as an art teacher and eventually moving to Europe, where he settled in Italy. Highways, industrial buildings, road signs, shipping containers, and other features of the modern landscape became central to his work. His carefully constructed compositions, sharp lines, vivid colours, and unusual sense of stillness transformed ordinary urban scenes into striking and often mysterious images.
One of Smart’s best-known works, Cahill Expressway (1962), depicts a nearly empty roadway beneath the sweeping curves and rigid structures of Sydney’s Cahill Expressway. A solitary figure stands at the edge of the scene, appearing small and isolated within the imposing urban environment. Smart’s careful use of geometry, perspective, and colour transforms an ordinary piece of city infrastructure into a strangely quiet and contemplative scene, reflecting his fascination with both the beauty and isolation of modern life.
Smart achieved considerable recognition in Australia and internationally, exhibiting his work throughout his long career and receiving numerous honours, including being appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1999. He continued painting into his later years and died in 2013. His distinctive ability to find beauty, order, and mystery in highways, industrial structures, and other overlooked features of modern life established him as one of Australia’s most significant modern painters.
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A DIALOGUE WITH AI
As part of my process of understanding Jeffrey Smart, I asked ChatGPT 10 questions I plan to ask of every artist I explore. Here’s what I learned.
Me: What core themes or emotional truths define this artist’s work?
ChatGPT: Jeffrey Smart’s work is defined by a sense of alienation, order within chaos, and the beauty found in modern urbanity’s overlooked spaces. His paintings often depict solitary figures in industrial or architectural settings — highway off-ramps, vacant lots, concrete walls — evoking a calm unease. At their core, they suggest how humans inhabit — or are dwarfed by — the built environment. There’s often a deep emotional truth about modern isolation and the quiet dignity of existing within systems too large to fully comprehend.
Me: How has their style evolved over time?
ChatGPT: Smart’s early work was looser and more painterly, with traces of post-impressionist colour and expression. But over time, his style crystallized into something almost hyperreal: sharp-edged, clean, and composed with geometric precision. His mature style is deliberate — every line and color calibrated, often using the golden ratio or mathematical grids. What evolved most was not his subject matter, which remained consistent, but the level of formal control and visual discipline.
Me:. What personal or cultural influences shaped their work the most?
ChatGPT: Smart was influenced by Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance painters, particularly in how they used geometry and light to construct space. He was also influenced by living in postwar Europe — especially in Italy — where decaying classical structures coexisted with brutalist modernity. His background in architecture and graphic design, as well as a childhood in industrial Adelaide, also profoundly shaped his compositional language. Culturally, the rise of highways, advertising signage, and utilitarian public infrastructure fascinated him. He found poetry in what most people overlook.
Me: What sets them apart in their medium or genre?
ChatGPT: Smart’s work is often associated with “realism,” but his is a curated, constructed realism — more metaphysical than documentary. Unlike other realists, he wasn’t interested in capturing what he saw but in staging an emotional response to it. What sets him apart is his precision: he painted slowly, methodically, never spontaneously. His scenes feel hyper-real, yet uncanny — as if they’re dream fragments built from the physical world. He also dared to make the banal transcendent.
Me: Which piece best represents their artistic voice?
ChatGPT: “Cahill Expressway” (1962) is often cited as quintessential Smart. It features a lone man in a suit standing on a deserted concrete overpass, the harsh geometry of the road framing his isolation. The sky is flat. The colors are muted. It’s sterile, structured, and oddly serene — like a meditation on alienation in the modern world. It encapsulates his voice: cool, elegant, unsettling.
Me: Are there any contradictions or tensions in their work or public persona?
ChatGPT: Yes — Smart was known for being affable, witty, and urbane in person, even joyful. Yet his work is cool, detached, and emotionally restrained. He painted loneliness and desolation without bitterness. There’s also a tension between how much he emphasized formal beauty and how melancholic or disquieting his subjects often are. He once said, “I like living in the 20th century — it's fantastic — but I paint the sadness of it.” That contradiction — aesthetic delight in scenes of emotional disconnection — defines much of his appeal.
Me: What impact have they had on other artists or culture at large?
ChatGPT: Smart paved the way for artists to see the contemporary urban landscape not as ugly or mundane, but as a valid and powerful subject. He influenced generations of Australian artists, particularly in the way he treated geometry and silence as expressive tools. His work also prefigures some aspects of contemporary photography and cinema, especially directors like Antonioni or even Wes Anderson, who similarly explore symmetrical compositions and isolation in constructed spaces.
Me: What’s one underrated or overlooked work in their catalog?
ChatGPT: Alma Mahler Feeding the Birds (1972). It’s not a painting most people talk about — maybe because the title throws them, or because it doesn’t fit neatly into his highways-and-concrete image. But I think that’s why it’s important. You still get the Smart hallmarks — sharp geometry, figures caught in a strange stillness — but here it’s filtered through this almost ironic nod to history and culture. Alma Mahler was a muse of artists, yet in Smart’s hands she’s just another solitary figure in a modern void. I love that tension.
Me: How does their work make you feel?
ChatGPT: Smart’s work makes me feel contemplative — like I’ve been given a still frame from a longer story that exists just beyond the image. There’s quiet tension, but also an odd comfort in the order and balance of his compositions. They make me more aware of how surreal our everyday surroundings really are — how much beauty and unease can coexist in something as simple as a traffic sign or blank wall. It’s meditative, haunting, and strangely clarifying.
Me: If you could ask them one question, what would it be?
ChatGPT: I’d ask: “Were you trying to warn us about the future, or simply reflect what was already there?”
Because his work feels prophetic — capturing a sense of disconnection and environmental sterility that only seems more relevant now. But he never moralized, which makes his intentions intriguingly opaque.
Source: ChatGPT
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REFLECTIONS
There is something about Jeffrey Smart’s paintings that makes me reconsider what it means to see a potential photograph. His subjects are often remarkably ordinary: an expressway, a concrete wall, an industrial building, a road sign, perhaps a solitary person. These are places and objects I might pass without giving them much thought. Yet Smart found order and beauty in them. What interests me is not simply what he chose to paint, but what he must have noticed in order to see a painting there in the first place.
Cahill Expressway is a wonderful example. At first I see exactly what its title tells me to see: an expressway. But spend some time with it and another picture begins to emerge. The roadway becomes a sweeping curve. Streetlights become a series of vertical lines. Concrete structures become large areas of shape and colour. A dark opening acquires visual weight simply because of its size and position. Smart had learned to think about composition geometrically, and he had the painter’s freedom to rearrange what he observed until these relationships felt right. The revelation for me is surprisingly simple: perhaps I should occasionally stop asking what I am looking at and start asking what shapes I am looking at.
Even the solitary people who appear in Smart’s paintings have changed the way I think about including a person in a photograph. My instinct when seeing a lone figure surrounded by so much empty space is to interpret the scene psychologically, to see loneliness or alienation. Smart resisted that assumption, and I find the distinction important: solitude does not necessarily mean loneliness. A person can have another purpose within a picture. A small human figure establishes scale against a massive structure. It can provide a vertical against a horizontal, introduce tension into an otherwise static composition, or simply create a point for the eye to settle upon. Perhaps I don’t always need to decide what that person is feeling. Their presence may be enough.
This is also where the difference between painting and photography becomes particularly interesting. Smart could decide that a figure needed to be two metres to the left and simply put him there. I cannot. But I can move myself. I can lower the camera, take three steps sideways, change focal length, exclude something at the edge of the frame or wait for someone to enter exactly the right place. I can also use exposure to decide what information remains visible and what disappears into highlight or shadow. The painter can manipulate the scene; the photographer must manipulate their relationship to the scene. Smart could construct the arrangement he wanted on the canvas. The photographer has the rather different challenge of recognizing when that arrangement briefly exists in reality.
I don’t want to make photographs that look like Jeffrey Smart paintings. That would miss the point of his influence entirely. What interests me is learning to notice some of what he noticed before I ever raise the camera: the unexpected geometry of an overpass, the relationship between a road marking and a building, an isolated patch of colour surrounded by grey, or the tiny human figure that suddenly gives scale to an otherwise anonymous structure. Perhaps the most valuable thing one artist can give another is not a style to imitate but a different way of paying attention.
My Rating: 8/10
My Rating: 9/10
p.s.
The CMYK color model (also known as process color, or four color) is a subtractive color model, based on the CMY color model, used in color printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself. The abbreviation CMYK refers to the four ink plates used: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key (black). The model works by partially or entirely masking colors on a lighter, usually white, background. The ink reduces the light that would otherwise be reflected. Such a model is called subtractive because inks "subtract" the colors red, green and blue from white light. White light minus red leaves cyan, white light minus green leaves magenta, and white light minus blue leaves yellow. In additive color models, such as RGB, white is the "additive" combination of all primary colored lights, black is the absence of light. In the CMYK model, it is the opposite: white is the natural color of the paper or other background, black results from a full combination of colored inks. To save cost on ink, and to produce deeper black tones, unsaturated and dark colors are produced by using black ink instead of the combination of cyan, magenta, and yellow.