JOHN FIRTH-SMITH: ‘FULL CIRCLE’
Nicholas
Thompson Gallery, 29th April – 21st May 2017
The artist is a distinguished figure in Australian painting, noted for absorbing the colour fields and stripes of New York Minimalism in the seventies, while retaining links with the more freewheeling abstraction of Tony Tuckson, Michael Johnson and John Olsen, under whom he studied at the East Sydney Technical College in the early sixties. The work often maintains an implicit landscape orientation, further aligning it with local tradition, while an abiding love of waterways and sailing strongly suggest the harbour world of Sydney. It is this extending of tradition, absorbing overseas influences and redirecting them to more local and personal ends that continues to hold our attention. The current show cannot be properly appreciated without some indication of these developments.
Untitled (1972) 172.9 x 366.7 cm acrylic/canvas (courtesy of the AGNSW collection) [NOT IN SHOW]
Firth-Smith is also an inveterate traveller and collector of all manner
of curios and materials and these activities are reflected in underlying themes
to the work. At a formal level, the work oscillates between a marked
accommodation or collection of elements within a literal framework, their
relations as mere two-dimensional measurement and colour, while on the other
hand, emphasising an austere exclusion, a purity to the relation, a self-sufficient
identity. One denotes the detached traveller, the other the compulsive
collector. There is a psychological dimension to this disengagement, indeed its
balance or compensation in collecting or assembling, should one care to delve
more deeply. But usually and more directly, this dynamic is tracked as gradual
concessions to figuration from the mid seventies and greater awareness of
metaphor and expression throughout later work. By the mid eighties, the work
looks closer to Neo-Expressionism than Minimalism and by the turn of the
century attains a baroque, Post Modernist breadth. These changes bring distinct
undertones. Where the Minimalist work sings of colour harmonies and
complementaries and revels in a brushy aplomb, work from the eighties is
notably more dense and tense, as the sweeping lines, squeezed directly from a
paint tube attain a surprisingly adamant tone in contrast with vigorously
gouged or combed backgrounds. The work declares a heaviness to gesture. There
is also a strictness or precision in the use of circles and ellipses, often a
darkness or greyness to palette. The combination suggests that the balance of opposing
impulses at that point came at some cost.
Later work diversifies, venturing into literary allusion (such as Salome 2001) still lives of banjos and lamps, deeper space and horizons to seascapes (such as Long Reef 2009). There have always been experiments, but this growing versatility brings a more relaxed and confident mood. Rich colour eventually returns. There are still works that zealously guard their self-reference or remain completely abstract, but here the distinction between ground and element becomes far less clear, as more vigorous technique erodes the distinction
We now have something closer to Abstract Expressionism, where the sense
is of an immersion in process and the slipperiness of either accommodation or
identity; form or content. But the breadth of interests by this stage relieves
such equations of some of their primacy or urgency. Such works acquire a lush
fluency, a greater variety of means or technique, a greater awareness of tools.
Firth-Smith’s contribution here may be less conspicuous than in earlier phases
but continues to gently refine local considerations, for gesture or facture and
a range of emblems or metaphors available.
More recently, the artist has turned to the remains of long abandoned house
foundations and casual archaeology for inspiration, features discovered around
Hill End in Western NSW, where he now lives. His first show of these at the
King Street Gallery in Sydney in 2016 was considered one of the highlights of
the exhibition year by SMH critic John McDonald. The current show at Nicholas
Thompson covers similar territory and the initial impression is of how light
the paintings are, in palette, facture and mood, how loose or casual the line
in figuration. The artist now even admits a figure – a woman in a black bathing
suit – together with garden tools, sundry trophies, talismans and rusted
relics. Water is still present, and the artist still plots his picture plane
like a floor plan, or in strict two-dimensionality. But rather than wrestle
with issues of depth or scale, accommodation here is more a matter of an
assembly of panels as suites, diptychs or triptychs.
Salt Water Salt Air (2016) 183 X 213 cm mixed media on two canvas
panels
In Salt Water Salt Air (2016)
the elements of water and figure are granted separate panels, not because the
figure is not bathing, but because the painting is intent upon the entire
volume of the pool, as a sheer area of swirling blue, as well as the figure and its displacements and motions. In fact
one cannot resist looking for some trace of the figure in the empty pool, as
some kind of resolution, such is the novelty of the arrangement and compelling execution.
This picture alone makes the show worth visiting.
Other objects pictured are often encrusted or distressed and the
painting furthers this identity with spatters, drips and washes over them,
adding its own weathering and history. Even the term ‘washes’ deftly fuses
nautical imagery with bathing and painting technique. The paintings thus forge
a formal integration as much as an accommodation (and the use of housing foundations
is hardly coincidental with this term). The work makes rooms for the artist’s
world with a cleaner, lighter touch. Little wonder that brooms figure amongst
the tools, or that their backgrounds comprise broad ‘sweeps’ of colour, as if
applied with a broom.
Trophy No 2 – Eye on the Prize (2012) 91.5 X 61 cm
The trophies certainly add to this sense of achievement or reward and
with the curving flourish to handles perhaps suggest that they too share a
spiralling arc, in which at some point they might stand for a person. But it is
the series of small pictures based on rusted farm equipment and fittings titled
Rural Rust (2015) that suggest not
just retrieval but transformation, not merely an array of long discarded tools,
but elements in their own little landscapes of locks and hinges, horseshoes and
screws, all personifying forgotten lives and places.
Rural Rust
(2016) each panel 61 x 30.5 cm, mixed media on canvas
Trap (2015) 70 X 50 cm mixed media on canvas
But while Firth-Smith is certainly alive to the pictorial potential in
his subjects, one suspects he is reluctant to be too tidy with meaning, too
ambitious or clever. In Trap (2015) a
vintage copy of the Penguin paperback, Farewell
to Arms by Ernest Hemingway is clamped to the upper right corner, more or less
as a ‘lure’ to some arch, literary interpretation for the battered rabbit trap
depicted in the upper left, or perhaps conversely, and a little
controversially, to urge the novel as some kind of rabbit trap. The orange to
the margins of the book cover perfectly match the broad margin to the painting
so that formally, the book presents an elegant counterpoint to the dangling
rabbit trap, one projects into the painting, the other out. One invites more
remote reference, the other more direct or literal reference. So what do we
make of the relic, even if we recognise it as a rabbit trap? The painting strips it of all context and
places it on a pale ground framed in orange, just as the book cover presents
the title of the novel (a wartime romance) and while the trap undoubtedly has a
tale to tell, plainly that is not foremost in the painting. Rather, it is its
appearance as simply an isolated relic, as detached and abstract as the
surrounding strokes and scrapings of orange and white. In short, the bait is really
figuration and the target forthright painting. The novel looms as a side menu
really, a reminder that a world and wider meaning lie just outside the picture
plane. In this respect the clamp holding the book functions as another kind of
trap, (indeed the title Farewell to Arms,
may hold sober warning for rabbits). It is a modest and surprisingly rich
addition to the theme of Full Circle, but here too the artist returns to first
principles with renewed conviction and surveys the damage.
The Australian landscape tradition has long since splintered into
indigenous tribal traditions and more urban concerns and ‘common ground’ seems
harder to come by than ever. But an awareness of history, of revision and
retrieval on even the most modest scale, within one’s own career or across the
priorities of painting, are useful steps to maintaining a consensus.
Firth-Smith continues to demonstrate that much.
All images courtesy of the artist, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne and King Street Gallery, Sydney. My gratitude to all for assistance in preparing this review.
OTHER ONLINE RESOURCES
The Roslyn Oxley Gallery, while no longer representing the artist , continues to display an excellent selection of his works on their website.
