Jeffrey Smart

Last year our final topic with the Waverley Art Quilters was the Australian artist, Jeffrey Smart.

I had done the quilt top in time for our meeting last year but I have only just finished binding it.

Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 26th July 1921 and died in Italy on 20th June 2013.

Jeffrey Smart had moved to Italy in 1965 and spent the rest of his life there. He had success in Australia and internationally and became known for his stark representations of urban landscapes often preferring primary colours.

I found a wonderful book showing most of Jeffrey Smart's paintings in the local library.

Motifs of highways, street signs, buildings and oil drums feature in many of his work and they create a still and silent atmosphere.

Jeffrey Smart often commented that painters do not paint their current environment and he wanted to show the beauty of man-made structures. He was not interested in the beauty of flowers or landscape and believed that composition was everything and people should view art with their eyes and not their head.

Here a couple of Jeffrey Smart paintings that were in the book.

For my quilt I used blocks of colour to make an almost abstract composition inspired by Jeffrey Smart's style.

After I had finished the top I didn't like the green and white strip that I had inserted. The green didn't relate to anything else in the quilt.
I tried a piece of brown fabric over the top and I didn't like that either.

I finally decided to use blue and had to unpick the green and white fabric and sew in the blue strip of fabric.

I thought that it looked like a more successful composition.

I kept the quilting to geometric lines because I felt that feathers and more organic quilting stitches did not suit the quilt.

Jeffrey Smart ©Linda Steele November 2014

Bye for now,
Linda