Michael Smither: “Art Gives You An Emotional Map”

“Art gives you an emotional map of your environment.” Michael Smither 4 Dec 1971. Michael Smither has long been one of my favorite New Zealand artists.

It was his landscapes that first spoke to me, but he has other brilliant work as well.  He’s a Christian artist, and an artist who is happy to talk about his views and his work.  That’s a huge plus, because being privy to the thoughts of a good painter is a privelege.

I was glancing through a catalogue of one of Michael’s exhibitions when the above quote caught my eye.  And it resonated so completely with what Gerald Celente said in the video I published yesterday, that I felt obliged to file this post.

As a society, we need to be very careful about what art we are encouraging in our public galleries.  In some cases, gallery managers like to take a laisser faire approach and talk about “the freedoms” – freedoms of artists to produce what they think fit and freedoms of galleries to put it on display.

Unfortunately, the fact that every freedom or ‘right’  carries with it a responsibility to the rest of the community (and I’m speaking as a lawyer here) has been lost sight of in our modern times. Art news circulating on the net today confirms for us (if we didn’t already know it) that some parts of our “emotional map” are very badly warped, yet they are getting top level exposure.

We could do with getting some moral fiber back into the art world.

Having said that – a number of Smither’s cityscapes and landscapes are what he called “God’s eye” paintings.    He used  “God’s eye” rather than “bird’s eye” intentionally.  As the catalogue comments: “The moral implications of such a distinction are clear.”

Below is one of his “God’s eye” works – “Composition – Railways” 1967, showing dawn breaking over the harbour and railway station of the town of New Plymouth, Taranaki, where Michael lived.  It expresses a social, almost documentary approach to the waking city, and the contrast between the natural world and the human environment are clear as the railway line and the city hug the coastline with its tumbled rocks, which look almost like breaking waves against the sea wall.

Christian artists do not always paint formally “Christian” works.  But the spirit is there nonetheless – as I hope to show shortly.

I’ll be putting up some more of Michael Smither’s works shortly.

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