A Life of Color and Devotion Eric John Smith began his life in Brunswick, Melbourne, where he first learned the fundamentals of commercial art and painting at the Brunswick Technical School. His early years were shaped by the heavy responsibilities of adulthood and service; he joined the Australian Army in 1940, spending much of the Second World War away from the easel. When the conflict ended, he returned to Melbourne to continue his studies under a rehabilitation training scheme at RMIT. There was a quiet, hardworking quality to his early existence, a period marked by the grit of a man who…