Strangers in the Day…
parking-lot-near-bologna, 1970
As we have seen, most people in Jeffrey Smart’s painting are alone. If more than one, they rarely do anything together. One category of people make an exception. Two or even more, they not only appear on a painting but they even communicate. Apart from being men, these people are without exception truck drivers. Sometimes road workers are several, but they don’t work with each other, they work parallel the same as two-year-olds do.
I want to stay with one particular painting, where two huge lorries meet on a parking place in a desert landscape. This is Jeff’s most appealing painting of lorries, this time not seen from the rear end as rectangles, but from their impressive sides, one turned in one direction, the other in the opposite direction. The two drivers, twenty to thirty years old, one of them bare legged, are standing outside talking to each other. Strangers in the day, they do it their way, as Sinatra
sang. After this Brief Encounter, their trucks are turned to go opposite ways. This creates a sadness over the whole scene. Only a homosexual could have painted this. The perfect love between two young men. The dream so many of us nourished.
Every detail of his picture is magnificent. One must contain plenty of love for a cause to devote hour after hour, day after day, god knows how long time to create a meticulously scripted masterpiece like this. Don’t tell me, Jeffrey Smart, you put those guys in this painting to get the colour balance right, or to perfect the geometric balance. That is as perfect as it could ever be. Love put those guys there and an unbearable sadness, for never being reachable and never sharing their love.
Only we who know can suffer, Jeff.