Hopper focuses on "eerily realistic depictions of solitude in contemporary American life", works of similar appearance to Smart's. Like Hopper's, Smart's paintings have been compared to post-war Italian movie stills of the 1950s and sixties – where beauty is poetically captured in the 'humdrum' Italian cities. Alex Colville painted desolate landscape settings with lonely characters, and used much the same geometric underpinning and bold colours. Technique Smart regarded being able to draw the human being as the single most important attainment of any artist. When asked why none of the people in his pictures are ever painted smiling, he said that he could not draw smiles well. Unlike many primarily landscape artists, he could paint both the human form and the human face, as can be seen in his self-portrait work. He regarded abstract painters as people who never learnt to draw. Smart mostly painted with oil, acrylic and watercolours, generally using the bold primary colours – yellow, blue and red – and dark greys for his skies. This created an unusual effect in his works as the foregrounds of his paintings are fully lit despite the dark sky. His process of painting was a long and arduous one, resulting in barely a dozen finished canvases a year. "I always do a lot of preliminary drawings, moving the forms, the shadows, the buildings the figures around the canvas till I get that perfect composition ..." Much of Smart's direct artistic stimulation came from, literally, a passing glance as he was driving: "My paintings have their origins in a passing glance". "Sometimes I'll drive around for months ... despair, nothing, nothing, then suddenly I will see something that seizes me: a shape, a combination of shapes, a play of light or shadows and I send up a prayer because I know I have the gem of a picture." Images Smart was a prolific artist; in the period 1939–82 he produced at least 800 works, and was still producing new works in 2011 (at the age of 90). The following are a small selection of Smart's work, arranged in chronological order. The list also indicates those works in public collections. AGNSW, Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney) AGSA, Art Gallery of SA (Adelaide) AGWA, Art Gallery of WA (Perth) NGA, National Gallery of Aus (Canberra) NGV, National Gallery of Vic (Melbourne) QAG, Qld Art Gallery (Brisbane) TWMA, TarraWarra Museum of Art (Healesville) UQld,