GORDON SMITH

Gordon Smith (b. 1919) is an English born Canadian painter, printmaker, sculptor, and educator living in West Vancouver, British Columbia. He is a key figure in the history of Modernist painting in Vancouver.

Born in the UK, Smith immigrated to Canada with his family in 1933. Smith taught and practiced commercial design and illustration in Winnipeg, studying at the Winnipeg School of Art, before leaving for Europe as an intelligence officer in World War II. He returned wounded in 1941, and in 1946 began teaching at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) alongside Jack Shadbolt and B.C. Binning.

In 1951, Smith travelled to San Francisco and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Elmer Bischoff and fully converted to Modernism. On his return to Vancouver, Smith was working with a new vocabulary of modernism, and his landscape works were evolving towards Abstract Expressionism. In 1955, Smith emerged on the national scene when he won a purchase prize at the First Biennial of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada. He joined the Canadian Group of Painters in 1956, contributing to their shows regularly, and was appointed president in 1957. Smith attended Harvard University in the summer of 1957, taking art history, and in this same year, another solo exhibition of his work was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Smith attained international exposure in 1960 when he represented Canada at the Sao Paulo Bienal. In 1960, a Canada Council scholarship enabled him to travel to New York, Europe, and England.

In the 1970s, Smith contributed to the Arthur Erickson-designed Canadian pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka. His work shifted away from hard-edge abstraction and returned to landscape, but was informed by the colour and structural discoveries of his previous work. In 1976 he had another retrospective at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and a 1978 visit to Egypt brought a warm colour palette into his work for a time.

Smith retired from teaching in 1982 to devote more time to painting. His visit to the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1984 brought a change to a darker, cooler colour palette and a gestural brush-stroke in paintings of abstracted rock faces, forests and waterfalls. This new work was shown at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1987.

In the 1990s, Smith painted a series based on observations of graffiti in the subways of London, and a series of “black” paintings referring to his war experiences. Landscape returned after a visit to Monet’s home in Giverny, France in 1995, which inspired a long series of forest pool paintings. The Vancouver Art Gallery mounted another retrospective in 1997.

He won the Audain Prize in 2007 and received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in 2009.A member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art and one of Canada’s most important painters, Smith is a quiet, modest, yet confident man. When praised for his work, he responded "I am a hundred artists deep," graciously thanking his influences for his success. , he continues to live and work in Vancouver, producing abstracted landscapes. His work has been an evolving search for balance between abstraction and his love of the land, which has given us insight into both the act of painting and the essence of the West Coast

His work is in the collection of, among others, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. and in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England, as well as the Vancouver Art Gallery. He continues to have regular exhibitions of his large works at the Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. As a well-respected contemporary painter his works fill many corporate and private collections. In 2009 his massive wall sculpture "Beach Tangle" was installed in the lobby of the West Vancouver Community Centre, one of the venues for celebration during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

For other works by the artist, visit equinoxgallery.com