Artist

A painter who became an architect who became a painter

Australian artist, architect and town-planner Mervyn Smith (OAM) was born in Sydney in 1904. His move to Adelaide in 1941 saw his increasing recognition as one of Australia’s most accomplished pre-eminent watercolourists.

Throughout his life Meryvn’s architectural sensibility and skills informed his artistic output. His knowledge of structure and his attention to detail underpinned all his work, whether in the strong descriptive line of his drawings, or implied in the sweeping washes and easy flow of composition in his watercolours. “Every unnecessary detail [was] eliminated, but everything meaningful was retained.”1

His work exhibited some of the virtues of Expressionism due to the dramatic, expressive and apparently spontaneous power of his work, with bold, economic strokes of emphasis, full of movement. He delighted in the exhilaration of pure colour, using “full-bodied hues and strong free-flowing wash” to create works of dazzling vitality.2

Mervyn was a highly original and experimental watercolourist, consummate in realisation and control, breaking down the pre-conceived ideas of watercolor through innovations in style and technique throughout a long and prolific artistic career.

1. Marjorie Hann, The News, March 13, 1968:12
2. Louise Nunn, The Advertiser, July 24, 1993:25