designer, studied Commercial Art (1941-43) and General Art (1943-45) at the Perth Technical School and graduated with a State Art Teachers Certificate. She had developed an interest in design at secondary school encouraged by her art teacher, the painter Margaret Saunders , who taught her to design from her own drawings and to work out the repeats for printing. During her last four years at school (1934-39) she also attended Saturday morning classes held by Saunders at the Perth School of Art. Forbes Smith’s first exhibited works were two designs for needlework – Roses and Violets – shown when she was nineteen at the 1939 Annual Exhibition of the Society of Women Painters (established by Saunders in 1935). By 1941 she had consciously turned away from what she identified as the 'Englishness’ of such subjects and had found that her strongest work came from direct observation.
Many of the women in the Society of Women Painters were skilled in a variety of media and they developed a teaching network, both formal and informal via the membership. Forbes Smith learnt china painting through the Society, as well as pottery and leatherwork. There are similarities between the stylised wildflower designs used by fellow Society member Amy Peirl (née Harvey) on china and Forbes Smith’s textile designs. In 1947 she exhibited oil paintings with Amy Peirl (china painting) and Ethel Sanders (watercolours). Although WA did not have a Society of Arts and Crafts like other states, it can be said that the Women Painters fulfilled much the same role in terms of peer support and networks, albeit only for women. The Society is still in operation, having become incorporated in 1945 under a new name, the WA Women’s Society of Fine Arts and Crafts.
None of the designs in Forbes Smith’s folio were ever printed. At the time she was producing them the war prevented it. After the war Mrs Dell Johnson, a mantle manufacturer from Perth who had moved to Adelaide, expressed interest in her designs but nothing finally came of it. To pursue a career in textile design after the war Ira would have had to leave WA as the manufacturing base and expertise were simply not there. As a rather shy, unmarried, young woman this was something she did not contemplate. She therefore began teaching. She also received recognition as a painter, being invited to join the Studio Club, an informal but professional group of established women artists, in 1945 and the Perth Society of Artists in 1948.
After her marriage in 1952 to Herbert Clem Kentish, Ira lived at their Keysbrook farm, about sixty-five kilometres from Perth. She continued to be active locally as a painter, designer and craftworker while bringing up three children. She was one of a number of women who were active and influential in the shaping of Perth’s cultural life up to and immediately after World War II. Ira Kentish died at Keysbrook on 18 February 1994. To my knowledge she was the only one of her peers to be producing textile designs of such quality in WA, or indeed at all.
