James Smeaton
Exhibitions
Love Letter
Scott Livesey Galleries, 23/04/2022 to 14/05/2022
From a fog of international and state border closures, lockdown restrictions, five-kilometre radiuses, and separation from loved ones appeared a group of paintings that spoke of magic. This was a place where black and white created colour. I found it shocking that from the depths of winter arose works of such joyous sublimation. Suddenly alive was a sway, a yearning, a realm of perfumed shadows, warm winds, ocean birds soaring, pelagic currents, a mysterious littoral, low hanging moons, the sun, breaking dawns, dreams and dreamers, earthquakes and a land alive. It seemed these paintings were love letters to a place, a time, to so... Read More >
Autumn Selection
Scott Livesey Galleries, 14/04/2021 to 08/05/2021
A rotating selection of artworks. ... Read More >
The Wallace Line
Scott Livesey Galleries, 19/04/2018 to 12/05/2018
James SmeatonHeadland is the title James Smeaton has given to a large composition that features prominently in a recent series of otherwise untitled, though lusciously painted acrylic on canvas works. To describe these paintings as abstract would be to ignore the figurative, aquatic and terrestrial motifs that emerge from this haptic and gestural mode of painting. Headland is a notable case in point, for it features a centralised mass that is both geographical headland surrounded by turbulent waters, and what may easily be read as the artist’s own head in repose. Possibly the subject is rising from beneath the waves in a determine... Read More >
The Salon
Scott Livesey Galleries, 13/06/2015 to 25/07/2015
'The Salon'This unique exhibition will showcase a large and diverse collection of artworks and artefacts by artists that we represent, private collectors and works in stock and will rotate throughout June/July.Please note that the website will continue to be up-dated over the next few days.'The Salon' will be on view between 13 June to 25 July 2015... Read More >
Sweeping Water
Scott Livesey Galleries, 09/05/2015 to 30/05/2015
JAMES SMEATON: SUBMERGING ARTIST... James Smeaton has been painting consistently now for more than three decades… The aqueous and Zen-like title Sweeping Water is well matched to these canvases, for they contain sweeping ‘one stroke’ brush marks that conjure the vigorous dynamics of the seas…Despite the crisp delineations, the paintings have been created through a series of complex and indeed haptic layers of acrylic. In many of Smeaton’s canvases a dark impasto layer is buried like sediment beneath a sun-bleached topcoat of seductive pale pink or blue. Once these veneers have dried the artist sets to work, excavating wi... Read More >
Ceremony
Scott Livesey Galleries, 06/03/2013 to 28/03/2013
James Smeaton’s highly charged ink works on paper literally and metaphorically leave the West in their wake.The connection to the sea which infuses so much of his work is still there but gone are the obvious references to empty vessels, maritime flags and structures, colonial mapping and the journeys of ancient seafarers as they made their way by stealth across the seas. Smeaton substitutes this knowledge and passion for the distinct island cultures of Java, Bali, Lombok and Sumba. These are places he now knows intimately through regular residencies and has been immersed in the colour and diversity of Indonesian art and culture.Of... Read More >
The Red Sea / Birds of Devilbend
Scott Livesey Galleries, 29/04/2009 to 27/05/2009
James SmeatonThe Red SeaAs great as an ocean, and as rude, within.― Charles Cotton, The Tempest, 1869The drama of painting is enacted … in flatness against depth, skin wrapping the body, bones and pearls, rich and strange, at the thresholds of abstraction and narrative, but neither one or the other.The title of Full Fathom Five unites Shakespeare and Jackson Pollock, in a tempestuous maritime key. In The Song of the Sea Solomon’s columns are cast in both concrete and poetic form. Pier and Ocean invokes Mondrian, lurking in the background, extending beyond the frame, but rendered in an antiquated archival register. Blurry, blac... Read More >
