Jeffery Smart

Although Smart’s practice is dominated by imagery drawn from urban life, some of the paintings he produced in the 1940s depict the barren outskirts of towns and seemingly arid Australian landscape. In The salvagers, two boys are set amid industrial wreckage that appears to have washed ashore. Paintings such as this and Kapunda mines show the influence of Australian painter Russell Drysdale who Smart met in 1946. Both artists shared an interest in the surreal suggestiveness of British painters such as Graham Sutherland.