John Firth-Smith 'Rural Rust'

JOHN FIRTH-SMITH

JOHN FIRTH-SMITH RURAL RUST

28 FEBRUARY - 25 MARCH 2017

King Street Gallery on William 10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday 177 William St Darlinghurst NSW 2010 Australia T: 61 2 9360 9727 F: 61 2 9331 4458 art@kingstreetgallery.com www.kingstreetgallery.com.au Directors: Robert Linnegar and Randi Linnegar Shovel 2016 mixed media on cotton 152x30cm

John Firth-Smith studio in 1962 at Wyagdon (photo 2016)

The return - Wyagdon 2016 [triptych] oil on linen & canvas 152x244cm

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Rural rust series 2 2016 mixed media on canvas 40.6x30.5cm [each]

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”

When I went to art school at ESTC [East Sydney Technical College] I did sculpture with Lyndon Dadswell after switching from painting classes. I was also encouraged with my painting by Clement Meadmore who was a sculptor but was well versed on the NY School. He had many interests that he talked about – he was a great catalyst – he moved to NYC in the early 1960’s.

When at art school in 1962, another student Ian Van Wieringen and I held a joint exhibition at Terry Clune Galleries – “two eighteen year old’s”!! Upon returning to the art school we were somewhat surprised at being vilified for having this exhibition. A teacher there David Strachan suggested we leave and go west to Hill End where there were abandoned dilapidated cottages you could move into and use as a studio. We packed up and headed out of Sydney to reach Hill End. On the way, driving a beaten up VW on rough dirt roads with our art materials, we stopped when it got dark at an abandoned old house being used as a hay shed near Wattle Flat in an area known as Wyagdon. We set up there to live and paint, never quite making it to Hill End. It was extremely primitive living. We had a shotgun for hunting rabbits and ducks, cooked on an open fire and washed in the nearby creek. The paintings from there were exhibited at the Hungry Horse Gallery in 1963.

After leaving the bush, we both lived in a boat shed in Lavender Bay.

In 1962, all through this part of the Gold fields country there were abandoned cottages usually covered with huge giant blackberry bushes. Crawling in underneath and getting inside revealed untouched things – clothes in draws, old furniture, all sorts of things – a pipe on the mantelpiece that had just been left when people walked away – this was before collecting Australiana and Antiques mattered, TV was relatively new, Rock and Roll, Bob Dylan and the Stones were just becoming known.

Swagmen still walked the rough dirt roads.

I have always had an affinity with the sea growing up on Auckland harbour and spending forty years on Sydney harbour. This has inspired me over the years and still does having spent a lifetime around boats working on them and sailing. This along with world travel and living for long periods in places like NYC where I saw a lot of art that has enriched and inspired me. But I kept re-visiting the Hill End area regularly over the years from the early 1960’s. Since 1995, I have been spending much more time in Hill End and have been living here full time as of 2009. I love the magic of this whole area and wanted to do a series on my response to being here.

It’s not about nostalgia or sentimentality but more a kind of amateur archaeology- finding old shards and rusty objects often found when gardening, digging holes to plant trees, also just lying about the property and things found in old sheds – nothing is thrown away just put out

Camille Pissarro

the back out of sight. Heaps of old bottles – beer bottles with dates on the bottoms scattered where once there were cottages that are now just a pile of old rusty iron roofing lying on the ground. The foundations of long gone buildings and heaps of old stone and bricks.

Being an old gold mining town from the 1870’s there are old bottomless shafts, mines and diggings everywhere along with worn out shovels and picks found leaning against rocks that have been there for years and years, vehicles and rusty equipment all evidence of hard work.

Also the wonderful clear night sky’s there – this stimulates my interest in astronomy.

The Hill End studio is a large shed built where originally there had been a huge shed that housed horse stables and wagons and sulky’s along with a blacksmiths shop.

This could account for the large number of hand forged rusty steel and iron finds on and in the ground. Some of these rusty things that no longer have a real use other than their intrinsic form are not unlike driftwood on a beach that can’t be identified as a tree or part of a structure anymore but become sculptural objects.

But the clock ticks and the pendulum swings.

I am in Hill End now but yearn for the ocean again.

John Firth-Smith 2017

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.”

Oscar Wilde 3

Splitting differences 2009 ceramic, steel 80x40x26cm

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Old ways [triptcych] 2016 oil on linen & canvas 152x244cm

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Clean sweep series 1 - 6 2016 mixed media on canvas 152x30cm [each]

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Foundations # 2 2009 oil on linen 182x274cm

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JOHN FIRTH-SMITH In history we look at civilisation two ways. Forward: with structures and rituals in a state of action and completion (or decline). Or, more poignantly, backward: with buildings and cultures in ruin. John Firth Smith describes himself as an ‘amateur archeologist’ and his deeply established practice tends to the foundations of things. In relic and remnant, in shadow and in stain, the mark of toil, tools and structure hollows out a place for his distinctive geometry and bold patina. The new work marks a point of obvious departure. The paint is sheer rather than turbulent impasto. The proportions are diverse. And most clearly his eye has travelled inland to a dusty heart far from the coastal rim.

John Firth Smith’s trajectory to Hill End is like an arrow drawn back across decades. Held taut from the first forays of the early 1960s, and then released through a cycle of hundreds of paintings, in this show we follow an ellipse of return. In 2009 the artist generated a permanent studio there and so began a cycle of work that departed from an oceanic sense of place. The cool palette bleached into oxide. The forms assumed the raw heft of rust and caked earth. And the formal underpinnings of abstract composition evoked broken foundations, remnants of floor plans and scraps of function. “Hill End” muses Firth Smith “almost five decades on from my first encounters, is still a place where ancient things can be found in a field or at the side of unsealed road. Like the Viking sword recently discovered just sitting there above ground in Iceland, the

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encrusted objects I find have a sculptural resonance.”

Use and dis-use are obviously subjective terms. Here is a painter with a love of tools, some which serve a practical function and some that are crumbling into anachronism.

Dozens of sketchpads through the years have captured their lines. The studio walls hang with their arcs and right angles and the small painted studies of their form generate a nuanced lexicon. Is this a catalogue of lost technologies? This work is not so literal as that.

Hooked into the coiling energy of a painting that holds layered chambers within its core, a work such as “Old mine-Star of Hope”, presents a depth of illusion that could be a vertical window or an aerial shaft. Windows punched through space, spatial voids, rotted through broken wood or punctured by ripped tin evoke a vernacular that is abstracted. And just as the artist formed a strong visual language built on rope, canvas, spume and wake of a metallic harbour here is a new trope for the interior. You can’t look into this work without thinking about time. The time it takes to build.

The time it takes to forget. “These works” Firth Smith states with emphasis “are not about the landscape. I am not presenting a view. I was drawn to Hill End for the immensity of space for the vastness of scale, and that is what links this place to the sea and forms a chain within the work itself.” Space rather than spectacle.

Anna Johnson 2017

Hinge and anchor 2016 mixed media on canvas 122x91cm

Foundations 2009 oil on linen 182x274cm

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L to R: Foundations 8; 16; 15; 1; 6; 14; 12; 17 2016/17 mixed media on paper various sizes

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L to R: Foundations 4; 11 2016/17 mixed media on paper various sizes

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JOHN FIRTH-SMITH Born 1943 Melbourne, VIC, Australia 1987-96 Trustee, Art Gallery of New South Wales Education 1961 National Art School, Sydney 1983 Artist in Residence, Melbourne University 1991 Tutor, International Art Workshop, Omaru, New Zealand Solo Exhibitions [selected] 2017 Rural Rust King Street Gallery on William, Sydney 2012 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2009 Paintings and Ceramics, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2007 Selected Works, John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne 2006 The New York Works, A Survey, Embassy of Australia, Washington DC 2005 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2003 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2002 Lister Calder Gallery, Western Australia 2002 Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne 2001 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 1999 A Voyage that Never Ends (book launch and exhibition), Roslyn OxIey9 Gallery, Sydney 1998 Roslyn OxIey9 Gallery, Sydney 1996 Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney Group Exhibitions [selected] 2015 Opening Exhibition, Nicholas Thompson Gallery, Melbourne 2007 Harbourlife, Manly Art Gallery & Museum 2006 Stolen Ritual, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2005 Fireworks, Mackay Artspace touring exhibition, NSW, QLD and VIC galleries 2005 Landscape Now, Solander Gallery, Canberra 2005 Hill End Scenes, People or Objects, Inaugural Exhibition, NPWS Gallery, Hill End 2004 Spectrum 2004, FONAS, National Art School, Sydney 2003 The Year in Art, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney 2003 Australian Masters, Solander Gallery, Canberra 2003 Beneath the Monsoon, Touring Regional Galleries, Queensland

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2002 Fifty Years of Abstraction, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne 2002 Points of View, University of Technology Sydney Art Collection, UTS, Sydney 2002 The First 20 Years, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 2001 MCA Unpacked, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 1999 Silver, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney 1999 Fabric of Labour, BulIe Gallery, Melbourne 1999 Three Generations, Solander Gallery, Canberra 1998 Escape Artists: Modernists in the Tropics, Cairns Regional Gallery & travelling

QLD, NSW, VIC 1998 Axia Modern Art Opening Exhibition, Melbourne 1998 Australian Printmaking in the 1990’s: Artist printmakers 1990-95,

Sherman Galleries, Sydney 1997 Swingtime Eastcoast – Westcoast: Works from the I960s-70s, University of WA Collections ALCOA Pty Ltd, USA ANZ Bank, Commission, Melbourne Art Gallery of New South Wales Art Gallery of South Australia Art Gallery of Western Australia Australian National Gallery, Canberra Artbank Collection, Australia BHP Collection, Melbourne Bathurst Art Gallery, New South Wales Broken Hill City Art Gallery, New South Wales C.B.A. Bank, Sydney Commonwealth Loan Collection Curtin University Collection, Perth Dalby Art Gallery, Queensland Geelong Art Gallery, Victoria Georges Limited, Melbourne Grafton City Council, New South Wales McGregor Collection, Toowoomba, Queensland

Full CV available on kingstreetgallery.com.au

Mildura Arts Centre, Victoria Monash University Collection, Melbourne National Bank of Australia National Gallery of Victoria Newcastle Region Art Gallery Philip Morris Collection, Melbourne Power Gallery, University of Sydney Private Collections in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Europe and Asia Qantas Airways Collection, Sydney Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria Sydney Morning Herald Collection Tarrawarra Museum of Art, Victoria TownsvilIe City Gallery, Queensland University of Melbourne Collection University of Western Australia Visual Arts Board, Australia Council Windsor Council, New South Wales

Old Mine – Star of Hope [triptych] 2016 oil on linen and cotton 152x244cn

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King Street Gallery on William 10am – 6pm Tuesday – Saturday 177 William St Darlinghurst NSW 2010 Australia T: 61 2 9360 9727 F: 61 2 9331 4458 art@kingstreetgallery.com www.kingstreetgallery.com.au Directors: Robert Linnegar and Randi Linnegar Published by King Street Gallery ISBN: 978-0-9924229-6-7

Design: Sam Woods Photography: Robert Linnegar [cover image] Photography: Roller Photography, Sydney Photography: Gus Armstrong Text: Anna Johnson Text: John Firth-Smith Pot Plant 2010 ceramic, cement, steel 91.4x 91.4x45.7cm

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