to accommodate themselves to an increasingly impersonal environment" or as "statements on the dehumanising conformity of modern architecture and social painting". According to Smart however, "the truth is I put figures in mainly for scale". It is Smart's precise and unequalled attention to clean lines, composition and geometrics that make his eye-catching paintings stand-out "in the story of modern Australian art". "The subject matter is only the hinge that opens the door, the hook on which hangs a coat. My only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places. It is always the geometry". Under the tutorship lessons of modernist artist, Dorrit Black, Smart acquainted himself with the 'Golden Mean.' Also referred to as 'the golden ratio', 'the divine proportion', 'the mean of Phidias' and a number of other names, it has been used since ancient Greek times in many works of art and architecture. The golden mean is a geometric proportion, the ratio of which is approximately 1:1.618. This complex network of interlocking rectangles, triangles and diagonal lines, is used to calculate the structure of Smart's paintings, which form the basis of all his artworks. For Smart, geometry and precision of the composition is the key to successful art, much like how comedic timing is the key to the effectiveness of a punch line. "Today's most prevalent myth is that Smart's work has no content: that everything is a compositional exercise devoted to capturing a formal ideal of beauty". Smart's surrealism Smart's paintings have been referred to as 'surreal', but Smart contended that it was the modern urban world that was surreal and not his depictions of it. "I find myself moved by man in his new violent environment. I want to paint this explicitly and beautifully ... only very recently have artists again started to comment on their real surroundings". Some critics have argued that Smart's work comments on modern urban alienation, a post-industrial landscape that has fallen from human control. Others have cast him as a realist, hyper-realist, 'off-beat classicalist' and a metaphysical painter. Some critics have even referred to Smart's paintings as portraying 'Orwellian gloom' – a statement referring, in particular, to George Orwell's literary political masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four. James Gleeson believes that Smart's paintings are "too real to be real"; and believes that his realist portrayals of 20th century life are nothing more than superb geometrical compositions and bold