Linda Tyler on Michael Smither 'Tea Billy and Cups'

Linda Tyler on Michael Smither 'Tea Billy and Cups'

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023

This is one of many sink top paintings which Michael Smither has completed in his lifetime. The “Kitchen Sink School” is a term coined by art critic David Sylvester in 1954 to characterise a group of artists whose work depicted the gritty reality of domestic life – the washing up, the laundry, the making and serving of meals, as well as clearing up afterwards. Later, “kitchen sink realism” was more broadly applied to describe a British cultural movement in the later 1950s and 1960s which focussed on the day-to-day reality of working-class life in films, plays and novels. Smither embraced this term as he did still life painting in general, where he felt he could apply his skills to mundane subjects to express his feelings – in this case love and devotion to his mother – honestly. What could be more commonplace than a metal sink top with a Methven tap, with dishes stacked ready to be washed? As he said, “I took “the kitchen sink school” happening in theatre to be a literal event in art history”. Naturally, actual sinks appear in Smither’s work as they did in the expressionist British artist John Bratby (1928–1992).

Trained by his early Catholic upbringing to recognise Christian symbolism in vessels, Smither uses teacups and a billy here to great effect. The two blue-and-white cups which feature in this painting were themselves the subject of another Smither painting now in a Taranaki private collection which was included in the 2004 Ron Sang publication on his work. Writing about these cups, Smither revealed “I spent a long time making this painting from a drawing made in my mother’s kitchen, to honour my mother and our cup of tea together before I moved north. I started buying blue and white china for my mother, and all my still lifes with blue and white china are really about her.” Smither’s parents (familiar to those who follow his work from his unflinching portraits of them aged 61 and 59 from the 1970s) were very supportive of his career as an artist and he enjoyed a warm and loving relationship with them. Bill, a screen-printer who helped his son produce his work, predeceased his wife Mary, and he was depicted dying in bed in the 1985 Smither work The Death Watch. Five years older than her deceased husband, Mary Smither (1911–2003) lived on at 48 Doralto Road in New Plymouth and died aged 92. When this painting was made she was 81, and her son Michael was living far away from her, first in Monganui and then in Auckland.

This composition, with its glimpse of a stair to the back door and the bare winter trees in the garden seen through the kitchen window, might suggest how Mary’s life had become circumscribed as a widow, two years after her husband’s death. Or it could show her self-sufficiency. It is certainly a celebration of the comforting rituals of daily life, in this case boiling water for tea in an old aluminium billy on the coal range. Ultimately though, beyond its symbolic possibilities, this composition shows Smither’s ability to arrange recognisable objects to make an abstract pattern of chiming geometries, and his skill at balancing colour, light and texture.

Linda Tyler