Pete Smith was always fascinated by what people saw in his paintings – the images others managed to project onto his calm abstract landscapes.
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This was more interesting to him than any kind of intellectual discussion, with no judgment. For him, the most important thing was whether he had said what he needed and achieved the clarity, the "place of stillness" he always sought through his art.
But in the last year of his life, unbeknown to anyone, the stillness was slipping away. Paintings sat unfinished on easels in his large Fyshwick studio, while he worked harder than ever at his day job – high-level, in the corporate sector – and threw himself into equestrian events.
Smith did a lot of horse-riding in the last years of his life, initially as a way of facing a long-held fear, and later, as a full-blown passion. Robert Painter, Smith's partner for 22 years, has a theory about this relatively new-found interest. It's based on hindsight, rather than any scientific or medical knowledge, but Painter thinks perhaps Smith knew, on some level, that his brain was deteriorating, and was frantically throwing himself into work and acquiring new skills to stave it off. But he will never know for sure; nobody will. Just days after being diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of 54, Smith took his own life.
It was a shock diagnosis that no one saw coming, although the previous months had been marked by depression and despair – a nervous breakdown brought on ostensibly by stress and anxiety, and diagnosed as such. But these were symptoms of something long-term and serious.
Painter says that in hindsight the signs were there months, even years before, although Smith's decline in the last months was dramatic.
"I can never speak for Pete, but I guess I'm the closest person to him – my feeling is that he knew something was seriously wrong with his mind," he says.
"We said to him numerous times, 'You will get better', and he would say to me and to his family, 'Well, I hear what you're saying but I feel as though I'm never going to get better'. The dementia diagnosis confirmed that."
And there were clues well before the final call came confirming it. After the funeral, Painter found a journal entry Smith had written just three months before:
"I feel as though I'm disappearing."
It may have been a faint scrawl, a mark of desperation, but it was a stark recognition of what was, in fact, happening to his brain. Meanwhile, he, a regular churchgoer, struggled to remember the meaning of Easter and spent hours lying on the couch, unable to even decide what to wear.
"You're talking about a man who, in these days, would be regarded as early middle age. Young, a 54-year-old man who was a high-earning, highly regarded professional in his field, he was a productive artist, who regularly staged exhibitions and got good reviews, he was an equestrian, he was an Anglican," Painter says.
"He was a high-achieving person across multiple facets of his life, and by the time he ended his life, he couldn't decide what tracksuit bottoms to wear. So he had clearly been reduced to a capability and function and life he didn't want anymore because he couldn't do all the stuff he'd done in his life."
No wonder, Painter says, he decided to step off the faltering train.
Smith may have been many things, but he was an artist at heart. His art was his focal point, and without it, it all fell apart. But his was not the conventional trajectory. Abandoning art school early, he instead sought a corporate career to finance his passion.
It also just didn't suit him, and the way he practised, Painter says.
"I think one of the reasons he perhaps didn't complete art school at the very beginning, straight out of high school, is he didn't relate well to the intellectualisation of art," he says.
"Art itself is, of course, an industry that supports a major industry of analysts and critics, people who think about it, write about it, tell stories about it, people who sell it, people who collect it, and Pete wasn't really an intellectual.
"For him, art was, I think, more of a spiritual process, not that he was necessarily painting pictures about spiritual themes or subjects, but he felt that somehow the process of mark-making was for him a practical, spiritual sort of activity."
We're speaking over lunch in Kingston, not far from the art-filled house he and Smith shared for two decades. The first anniversary of Smith's death is still a couple of months away, but Painter (ironically, not a painter, but a public servant) is immersed in the surprisingly absorbing undertaking of organising an art exhibition. The show at M16 Artspace opens a year to the day since Smith died, and closes two weeks later, on the anniversary of the funeral. But this event, he is adamant, will be a joyful, hopeful one, with none of the grief and despair that marked his grand and elegant funeral last year.
Putting together a show is not something Painter has done before, not something he ever thought he would do. But once he started the painful task of winding up Smith's affairs, he realised, properly, for the first time, how all-encompassing art had been in his partner's life. How absorbed Smith had been, and how diligent and productive.
"It's made me realise how focused and how committed and how hard-working he was with his art," Painter says.
"While it was all happening, I was a bit more focused on, 'Oh well, looks like I'll be cooking tea again tonight', and I did in our relationship, because he was so busy and I work part-time."
Smith's final days had not been his first confrontation with the dark night of the soul; 12 years before, he had been diagnosed with liver cancer, and given five years to live. There had followed a substantial operation, and a nervous breakdown. When he recovered, he became a committed Anglican, resumed full-time work and entered his most fertile artistic period.
One of the first jobs he took after the breakdown was as the inaugural executive director of M16 Artspace, when it was run out of a shed in Fyshwick.
"Because it was a part-time job, it was a way of phasing back in, and he wanted something different," Painter says.
"He thought he'd try his hand at arts administration and they wanted a part-time facilitator, and that was great because it helped him develop a very good network of artist friends."
But, ever the pragmatist, he returned to the corporate sector to earn enough to be able to focus more on his art. For the next decade, life moved forward. He had a stressful job, went to church every Sunday, took up horse-riding – which morphed into dressage and events – worked hard at his painting, and exhibited his work in solo or group exhibitions every year.
Exhibiting and selling his art wasn't his main aim, though. Friend and fellow artist Jacque Schultze, who is curating the exhibition at M16, says painting was a way of life for Smith, rather than a specific outlet.
"Although at first we didn't talk too much about the spiritual side of the dimension of his art, it was just understood by me that this was a necessity for him, that this fit somewhere in his understanding of the universe," she says.
"It all seemed to make much more sense to me, his clarity of vision and what appeared to be an intensity but a calmness in what was presented.
"Although I know he pursued it with a lot of vigour and intensity, what came from it was this stillness, and I think that was something that I came to understand more as I saw more work. And his need, I think, to find that place. And I began to understand all the other factors in his life, that made this place of stillness but expansion, it was something he was really trying to pursue."
Like Painter, it wasn't until after Smith died that she was able to appreciate, for the first time, the evolution of his art, the way it all fit together in a cohesive whole. Although the exhibition at M16 will represent only a fraction of what Smith left behind, she hopes others will be able to see his journey in a similar way.
"As I looked at the early works from 1994-1995, I saw this real interest in line and mark-making, and I really see that carried through," she says.
"It'll be, I hope, effective and powerful, but has space for people to appreciate the work, to see the bodies of work, which is what I'm trying to get across … that journey of his progression as he developed and clarified things for himself."
Painter, for his part, is slowly getting used to life without Pete.
"Life's not as good as when he was around, but these things happen in most people's lives at some stage or another, and you have to figure out the best way of going forward, and either making a new life or making the most of your life," he says.
On an intellectual level, Painter knows that, if Smith had lived, both their lives would have been truncated – his own as a carer. He also knows there was nothing more he could have done for him, even if he had suspected earlier what was going on in Smith's head.
What he can do, instead, is celebrate his life through this exhibition.
"I'm hoping that the exhibition and opening will be happy, will celebrate his achievements and his incredibly productive and creative life," he says.
In many ways, Painter says, Smith's suicide was in keeping with how he lived his life and approached all problems – pragmatically, logically, with an eye to the future and an overriding need to ensure he could always get back to his painting. And if he was no longer able to paint, if he couldn't keep doing all the things that had filled his life so emphatically, he wasn't going to hang around and mope.
It was also, in many ways, an act of love.
"He was a mild-mannered person, he was very gentle, he was unassuming, but he had a very strong will, and, at the end of the day, Pete took responsibility and did what he needed to do, and that's what he did at the end of his life," Painter says.
For Smith, this new reality must have been defined, as much as anything, by those unfinished paintings back in his studio, works that would never be revisited.
Pete Smith, Glimpsed in passing: A retrospective 1995-2014, opens May 6 at M16 Artspace and runs until May 22. All works are for sale and profits will be shared with M16 to benefit emerging artists.
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