Now that Guy Grey Smith has become a well known collectors’ item, its hard to conceive the radical impact that his work once had. The more visually challenged investors worked out GGS as a name a year a two ago, with quite a bit of help from a particular gallery. The last thing they want to hear is that he was a difficult, challenging, courageous painter who faced up to the dilemmas and contradictions of working here without embarasssment, without resorting to the soft centred, cliche WA that became the endemic sine qua non of three post war generations of local painters, most notoriously his immediate colleagues from the fifties and sixties.

Since the visually challenged are paying, they don’t have to hear it, so his reputation faces a slow, smothering absorption into the indifferent, glutinous, cliched complacency that he hated most This hatred was expressed, famously and often, in his natural high anglican tones "Its all crap! Its all crap!". Meanwhile they have wasted their money and his work is wasted on them.

Even so nothing can prevent the steadily growing realisation that he remains the only serious painter to have worked here consistently in the postwar period. Only Howard Taylor is his only equal as an artist and, despite some common ground in the fifties, Taylor’s concerns were never painterly. In another half century Guy Grey Smith will remain, the only local painter to command passionate enthusiasm.

Grey Smith chose to paint landscapes. large WA landscapes at that. This over-worked ground could have been a bad choice for any artist who wanted to make his mark. In fact it offered the best chance of making painting which was resistant, confrontational, even epiphanic. Far from reworking the colonial formulae of Gibb, Pitt Morison et al with huge radical gestures in thick bright paint, worked over with a trowel, he went, deftly, straight for their jugular. He used his knowledge of and fascination with the problems of European notably English contemporary painting to produce work in which all those pre-programmed debrained responses to the local landscape vapourised at a glance.

That is the true significance of those sublimely subtle skies like sagging blue polyfilla, those slabs of burning orange with chrome yellow halos and his extraordinarily difficult surfaces, always an optical steeple chase. This was and remains a hard place, especially for artists Gre.y Smith painted it that way. like a grindstone for the eyes. The works in this tribute make clear nothing has changed. Breakaway Country Mount Magnet 1978 remains a difficult experience, all those differently toned viridian slabs with a rift of ochres yellows and pinks slashed through their centre and two mysteriously elegant black lines criss crossed in their upper regions.

Once you survive the tough business of looking at a work like this it becomes obvious that the slabs are carefully positioned, the skids grits and tone acutely well judged in terms of their impact on the visual form of the work, its coherence as painting first, WA landscape tradition a long way second or not at all. This is not to say that Grey Smith ignored the specifics of place or treated it merely as a motif. Quite the contrary, he suffered like Cezanne, whom he occasionally imitated, from the need to ‘realise’ his experience of place directly in the painting. Since the place was virulently inaccessible to any painter he painted the patterns of its resistance, flying blind like the pilot he was through a sublime jungle of blockages and absence.

The equally largeWindy Harbour evokes a huge mysterious space but a specific place It does so with a heavy dark paint that makes certain that the space is filled, dense, problematic lacking all prospect, let alone one that pleases. The eye does not travel into such space it bounces off it to settle again on another spot looking for a crevice to hang on to. What remains is obdurate brooding atmosphere, beyond time and space - so thick you could carve it.

Grey Smith’s work was often compared to that the Belgian De Stael. This looks less and and less convincing. His paint handling has more in common with The St Ives painters Lanyon, Winter and on occasion, oddly, Patrick Heron. The realisation of the painting in terms of the varying relationship between paint thickness and edges, which compresses and traps an intense depth between the strokes is typical of their work.

Formal ,plastic relations were far more important to Grey Smith than is realised. This is best seen not in early pseudo-cubist works, like the elegant Kings Park, but in a 1952 self portrait one of a series in which he struggled with the relation of volume and plane to the phenomena of human presence on the canvas. The blocky shadow across the centre of the face has both formal and psychic impact. As in the later landscapes presence as pure as possible, not pure formal relations or transgressive plastic expression, is the only aim

Two studies for portraits of Robert and Janet Holmes à Court show how he worked towards such a sense of presence through a net of black lines relation to translucent patches of colour. The gestures do not follow the face or form it. They are more like a scan touching here and there on the impossible reality of the person before him. The Holmes à Courts were great supporters, patrons and above all decent friends of Guy Grey Smith long before his work became a byword. This show is also a tribute to their friendship.