The Erin Pearson Collection

A private collection · Brisbane

Courtyard with Shadows
Courtyard with Shadows
Courtyard with Shadows
Courtyard with Shadows
Courtyard with Shadows

Courtyard with Shadows

Ian Smith

The Work

A courtyard seen obliquely from above, built up in layered mixed media on paper. A broad dark shadow spreads across the paving and holds the centre of the sheet, with patterned passages of brick and tile worked around it and a band of loose, bright marks along the top edge standing in for foliage. The palette is deliberately close — near-blacks, olive, ochre and grey — so the picture turns on the fall of light rather than on colour. Smith's year of architecture study shows in it: the subject is less the courtyard than the geometry the light makes of it.

Courtyard with Shadows sets architectural forms against the fall of light across a courtyard, built up in layered mixed media on paper. Smith's early training in architecture shows through in the structure of the piece, while the interplay of shadow and geometry gives it the pared-back, semi-abstract quality that runs through his work.

Medium
Mixed media on paper
Image size
650 mm x 465 mm
Framed size
825 mm x 650 mm
Catalogue
0016

Provenance

I first came to know Ian personally through connections made at the gallery where I ran ARTIS PURA, my custom framing business. Over the years I gathered several of his pieces. This one came to me along with five others through a Facebook Marketplace find — all in tired old frames that didn't do them justice.

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Framing

I reframed this one in Tasmanian Blackwood with UltraVue glass and 8-ply cotton rag matting, to give it the setting it deserved.

About Ian Smith

Ian Smith was born in Cairns, Queensland, in 1950. He began studying architecture at the University of Queensland in 1968 before leaving after a year, moving to Melbourne to complete a Diploma of Art & Design at Prahran College (1970–72). He returned to Brisbane in 1973 to teach painting and drawing at the Queensland College of Art, a role he held until 1979, when he left to paint full-time — a commitment he has sustained ever since.

Smith is one of Queensland's most significant living figurative painters. His work has been curated into major exhibitions both in Australia and internationally, including at the Queensland Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan, and Campo & Campo Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, where he lived for seven years through the late 1980s and early '90s. In 1988, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Brisbane staged a major survey of his work. He is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Gallery of Victoria, and continues to exhibit through Heiser Gallery and Woolloongabba Art Gallery in Brisbane.