ABSTRACT
Although his entry on to the stage of landscape design in the early 1980s was quite sudden, even dramatic, Smyth’s development as a garden designer was gradual, an evolution rather than a revolution. The early period, moderated by Japanese garden design, and Odo Strewe, was not yet a unification of his painterly sensibilities and his innate feeling for three-dimensional space. Smyth was a practising painter, busy with his development as an artist exploring the expressive capacities of colour and two-dimensional figuration, and supporting his family by designing and making gardens. This dual commitment ends with his last exhibition of paintings, at the New Vision Gallery in July 1972. From then he began to focus solely on his design-build practice, merging the personal, sensitive and poetic expressionism1 for which he had been building a reputation as a painter, with the artisanal investigations of the landscape maker as craftsman.
