“I found de Stael’s painting gave me an avenue of freer individual development – the simplification of form and the simpler movement of action.”
Guy Grey-Smith was a painter and a potter and it was his practice as a potter from which his painting technique evolved. His works in oils and clay could be described as having a refined-coarse quality and being quintessentially Australian. And while (by his own admission) de Stael may have sewn the seed, Grey-Smith shaped the final result to suit his needs as a painter and to contain the ruggedness of the Northern Australian landscape as a subject.
There’s a timeless quality to his works that have roots in the recent past and branches into the future. His paintings provide a constant source of intrigue as they are more complex than they first appear. The nuances in the primary colours, that he uses to telling effect, and the variation in paint quality to represent the different surfaces on show are uniquely his.
The physical act of painting was a performance he enjoyed and in this work Nullagine all of his talents and knowledge of making exciting art is on display.