THE RALPH MAYNARD SMITH TRUST___ ( Registered Charity Number : 1049843 )
Set up in 1995 to preserve and make known the works of the artist, writer and architect
RALPH MAYNARD SMITH (1904 - 1964)

EXTRACTS from Roger Cardinal’s Introduction to the monograph: “Ralph Maynard Smith : A Haunted Man”:

ROGER CARDINAL continues:

Transitions leading to “Free Is the Prospect Here”

MAYNARD SMITH’S explorations in Mull and Iona led to a rhythmic style of composition, influenced by Van Gogh but echoing also something of Cezanne’s robust forms. He would have been aware of the Scottish Colourists too, as his fiancée Gerry had studied at the Glasgow School of Art when Peploe and his associates were in the ascendant. As the 1930s progressed towards World War 2, a darker mood began to appear, accompanied by the occasional experimental painting, probing a new, more surreal world. But in whatever vein he worked, he continued throughout his life to record impressions direct from nature, giving his work substance and richness of form

DURING the early and middle period of the war, Maynard Smith produced a series of lyrical English landscapes, more consistently ‘pastoral’ in character than any group of subjects he had worked on before. He seems to have been motivated by the desire to evoke an idyll of the land to be protected against a violent enemy. Throughout his work as a whole there are very few attempts at direct representation of the War, and the few sketches that there are seem hesitant. The sometimes violent ‘war of the elements’ he increasingly recorded with expressive gestural techniques, signified rather the internal struggle of men within themselves. And after 1945, when it was over, he was not optimistic that it had been the war to end wars .

THE 1946 painting “Free Is the Prospect Here” is significant, not only in itself, but because it heralded the mature phase of his work. In 1949 he used the title again, for a large manuscript book containing 65 drawings and watercolours, in which, with numerous twists and turns, he explored all the pictorial avenues made possible by the breakthrough that that painting represented.

FRANCES CAREY, writing in her Introduction to Maynard Smith’s 2002 London Exhibition, in referring to his journals leads on to more generalised observations:

THE DRAWINGS in Maynard Smith’s manuscript book “Free Is the Prospect Here” provide the key to his middle period and later work. Some of his paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as “Eclipse of the Winged Embryo”, “Vertical Surfaces on a Beach” and “Circles and Moon” convey a sense of calm contemplation. It was as if he was aware that he had reached the territory for which he had been searching. Those paintings group together to form a new idyll, of images both lyric and surreal at the same time. Following these, a small number of watercolours and drawings were titled “Districts of My Kingdom”. These draw our attention to his imaginary world and its topography, which he had culled from natural topography. Walking through this land of the imagination, he was like some early cartographer, sketchbook in hand, recording its salient features for the first time.

IN “Wordless Urges” he encounters a more dangerous place, and as the years progressed the land he was exploring became sometimes more threatening still—mountainous areas where hurricane force winds raged and seas were threatened by great storms. About this time he wrote: “The things which are most real to me are the illusions which I create. Everything else is a quicksand.”.

REFERRING to the work of Nash, Sutherland and Piper, Roger Cardinal remarks:

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