Art of Tony Smibert, The: The St John Ambulance Collection

AUSTRALIAN ART

Represents a significant body of work by one of Australia’s most significant and innovative contemporary watercolourists – Tony Smibert, whose range iincludes evocative studies inspired by the period known as the Golden Age of English Watercolour.

Renowned Australian Artist Tony Smibert, works in watercolour and acrylics, producing contemporary art and traditional watercolours in Northern Tasmania.

Anthony Charles Smibert AM is an artist and aikido teacher. He has exhibited artworks and published research internationally, much of the latter on the methods of 19th-century watercolourist J. M. W. Turner.

Over more than 35 years, Tony Smibert AM has drawn on both European and Asian painting techniques to create acrylic wash and watercolour landscapes and abstracts of singular brilliance.

Smibert became a world-renowned expert on the work of British Romantic painter JMW Turner and an exponent of 18th and 19th century watercolour techniques, before breaking with the strictures of that tradition by studying and blending elements of Eastern brush and ink painting. Ultimately he departed from both such methods by developing his own form of acrylic wash on canvas. The results are large-scale paintings that register the rugged forms of the remote Tasmanian landscape conveyed in striking monotone hues that accentuate the contours and textures of stony escarpments and the tempestuous weather fronts that sweep across the island.

As a life-long practitioner of the Japanese martial art Aikido, Smibert is invested in the principle of Shuhari, being the three stages of ‘defending’, ‘breaking’ and ‘departing’ from the conventions of traditional practices.

Tony Smibert continues to make a vital contribution to Australian landscape painting through his unique artistic trajectory, his ability to modify and synthesise traditional techniques and media and his acute articulation of land and sea as conduits to spiritual experience. 

Signed by Author. (inscription) Numbered 549 / 1000

pp. 76 #310324