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<\/a><\/p>\nAlpine wildflowers<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n 2018, oil on linen, 100 x 100cm<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Every now and then an art teacher or critic will nominate an artist as \u2018a painter\u2019s painter\u2019 \u2013 not necessarily a helpful title, as it implies that painters exist as some exclusive little coterie. There\u2019s already too much hype and mystique surrounding the art-making process, ironically paralleled by a\u00a0 scandalous lack of Government support.<\/p>\n However I\u2019ll admit the term keeps coming to mind when considering Sue Smalkowski\u2019s work. Look – anyone making interesting, well-resolved paintings will be worth checking out, but there\u2019s more to it than that. There\u2019s an engagement some painters make with the actual physicality, the sensuality, of paint that makes those who regularly pick up a brush stop and take notice. There\u2019s a frisson.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Surrounding escarpment<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n \u00a02018, oil on linen, 122 x 122 cm<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then there\u2019s a \u2018tell\u2019- and anyone who\u2019s ever sat in a Gallery and observed the viewers will back me up here. It\u2019s a certain posture a painter adopts when they recognise a work they could and probably should learn from. They may adjust spectacles if any\u2026 step forward carefully to a position very close to the work, as though straining for a whispered message\u2026 then the chin comes up. There follows a minute examination.<\/em> You see that a lot in front of a Smalkowski piece.<\/p>\n Sue’s been working for 20 odd years, along the way establishing herself as a teacher of watercolour painting (a strand of her practice to be addressed another day.) I met Sue at TAFE in the nineties and have always admired both her talent and her modesty. The art scene is highly competitive, which doesn\u2019t hurt, but the muddy end of the pond can be tainted by envy and bitterness (and probably too much alcohol.) Someone like Sue who is quietly getting on with the job is a reminder that there are, indeed, practitioners who don\u2019t have some overblown sense of their own importance. They stave off self-doubt and chronic discouragement and make great stuff anyway.<\/p>\n Sue has an intense love of Nature, but the fact that the works spring from her response to the natural world may be almost beside the point to a viewer. Her paintings are not pictorial descriptions, even though the artist talks about experiences of actual places and times. Sue recalls the colours of a wildflower or a cliff-face from when she made her plein air<\/em> studies, but the finished paintings do not make me marvel at the wonder of nature. They are about themselves and to me that\u2019s precisely where the interest lies.<\/p>\n I simply fall in love with the art object itself. There is a vibrancy to her colour choices that nonetheless avoid the \u2018too sweet\u2019 zone. Then there is the rhythm of the works \u2013 that is, the journey the eye is taken on: the pauses; the quiet areas; the more vocal parts. I don\u2019t get a chance to get tired or bored, and in that sense alone, it\u2019s as though we are indeed on a bushwalk, or gazing into a rockpool: there is so much to see. Sue acknowledges inspiration from (amongst others) Elizabeth Cummings and John R Walker, both superlatively expressive painters. Like her, they respond to landscape with somewhat calligraphic expressions and a savvy and satisfying colour sense.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/moirakirkwood.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Surrounding-Escarpment_oil-on-linen_122-x-122cm-298x300.jpg\")
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