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Islander: The Paintings of Donald Smith

By Murdo Macdonald, 28.06.2021
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Donald Smith, Netmenders II, watercolour on paper, 1998, Private Collection. Photo Jonathan Smith.

Donald Smith is an intriguing and underappreciated figure of twentieth century Scottish art. Over the years it has been difficult to see his work outside the Hebrides, and there is very little in publicly accessible collections. The City Art Centre's current show is set to change all that. Great credit must go to curator David Patterson for his consistent policy of supporting lesser known but outstanding Scottish artists.

Donald Smith is a highly visually literate artist bringing the formal and intellectual lessons of European modernism to bear on his own experience of people, work, land, and landscape. He was born in Lewis in 1926 and he died there in 2014. During his education at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen in the early 1950s, Ian Fleming considered him to be the outstanding student of his year. That was high praise indeed from one of the key Scottish artists of the day, but this exhibition makes very clear why Fleming held that view.

After completing training as an art teacher, Donald Smith was appointed to Aberdeen Grammar School where one of his young pupils was none other than Arthur Watson, now past President of the Royal Scottish Academy. Watson remembers being struck not only by vivid prints of works by Paul Gauguin on the art room wall, but by the equally vivid presence of Donald Smith himself: ‘a new species previously unseen – an artist!’. He continues by noting that when, decades later, he saw Donald Smith’s paintings ‘they more than measured up to the man and the impression he had made on my younger self’. 

Donald Smith, Dearg Agus Gorm, oil on panel, 1984, Private Collection. Photo: Eion Johnston.

Throughout Donald Smith’s work there is an interest in modern design and engineering interacting with traditional practices. Such concerns are at the heart of the two great themes he explores in his work, the crofting landscape and the fishing activity of the quayside. Not only the visual fascination of such places, but with the work done in them.

So why did these two strands, crofting and the quayside, develop in Donald Smith work? He illuminates the question: ‘my father was a life-long socialist, at the living level, even before the political level, which gave me an outlook on life in general and motivated me.’  That explicit political engagement links him closely to the European tradition of artists such as Gustave Courbet. But that communitarian view can also be found in the paintings of Smith’s Highland predecessors, such as Courbet’s younger contemporary, William McTaggart.

In 1962, Donald Smith moved from teaching at Aberdeen Grammar School to become head of the Art Department at Summerhill Academy in Aberdeen, under the headship of the radical, child-centred educator R. F. Mackenzie. The family moved to Balmedie, a location that brought him close to working fishermen. During that period Donald Smith exhibited a number of works in Edinburgh at the Royal Scottish Academy and at the Society of Scottish artists, and it is intriguing trying to reimagine those exhibitions. In 1967, for example, he was exhibiting an oil painting simply called Fishermen, in a room that included work by Robert Callender, David Donaldson, Elizabeth Blackadder, Kenneth Dingwall, Denis Peploe, Mardie Barrie, and his Summerhill Academy colleague Maxie Bain. Good company indeed.

'Islander: The Paintings of Donald Smith' at City Art Centre, Edinburgh until 26 September 2021.

When he moved back to Lewis in 1974, he worked as a peripatetic art teacher and made a major educational impression. But he was also a crofter, directly in touch with his subject matter as an artist. He became what one might call a painters’ painter, focusing on his work rather than on any market for it. He kept sketching and painting at a prodigious rate, and sold to friends and locals, but many of his works ended up on the walls of his home, or stacked in his studio, rather than finding the appreciation they deserved further afield.

Donald Smith’s technical brilliance is always in the service of the subject matter at the heart of his art, namely the exploration of working community both in the sense of people at work and in the sense of a community that works. A transformer up a pole is part of successful community, just as is the strong design of a fishing boat, just as is the structure of a crofting township itself, just as is a net-and-machinery laden quayside.

Painters like Donald Smith see what is, not what is not. He is a close reader of the real. He does not tell us stories, but he shows us the storyteller mending his nets on the quayside. The rest is up to you. The best artists always respect the limits of their own work, and within those limits they find the universal, and make that opportunity to explore the universal available to their viewers. Focused on the immediate and the local, Donald Smith’s paintings have an instant global resonance.

'Islander: The Paintings of Donald Smith' at City Art Centre, Edinburgh until 26 September 2021