Sold for: $79,250

PROVENANCE
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
Acquired from the above by the present Private Collection, Vancouver, 2000

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997, page 34
Andy Sylvester, Gordon Smith: Don't Look Back, 2014, page 10, reproduced page 182

Gordon Smith was one of Canada’s foremost painters, and his legacy is of lasting importance - recognized by his appointment to the Order of Canada and his award of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in 2007. He was also a philanthropist who gave back to the artistic community in many ways. Smith taught for 26 years in the faculty of education at the University of British Columbia until retiring in 1982, then continued to give back by forming the foundation Artists for Kids Trust, to benefit children’s art education. He presented many workshops and lectures, and contributed to art galleries and arts organizations. A keen supporter of other artists, he encouraged them, bought their work and gave them financial aid. As Ian Thom wrote, former students “told me that it is Smith’s enormous enthusiasm for life and art that [has] remained so vividly with them…as has his ability to open their eyes to look deeply at the world in both art and nature.”

This stunning large-scale painting is a tour de force of painting effects. A continuation from works created throughout the 1990s like Winterscape (1991, collection of the Audain Art Museum) or Silent Woods (1997, collection of the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, University of British Columbia) that still contain recognizable subject matter, this work is seemingly entirely abstract. Yet Smith always starts from landscape, once stating, “Even when I tried to get away from it the landscape usually comes creeping back in.” He found inspiration in the landscape of the West Coast, from the woods around his home in West Vancouver, the North Shore mountains or up Howe Sound.

In Untitled, it is as if pieces of earth, forest and snow are thrown up and suspended in the air against a white ground, creating an all-over surface. Smith’s brushwork is superb – amorphous shapes of pigment loop and overlap. Some of these forms drip from their bottom edges, determining where they sit on the picture plane. The dripping is mostly vertical, but the insertion of horizontal lines establishes some depth of field. Sometimes shapes move in a sideways motion like small clouds; or they move vertically or diagonally. Smith created a dynamic conglomeration of organic shapes that are not static, but seem to move in a pulsating manner. The viewer’s eye dances over the painting, not finding any one place to rest, but enjoying the complexity of form and movement.

Smith’s palette is predominantly green, brown, black, grey and white, the colours of the landscape. Yet he emboldened his canvas with bright and vitalizing daubs of orange, pink, golden yellow and maroon, reminding us that he followed his own rules to create an exuberant and daring work. Untitled is a superb example of Smith’s consummate painterly abilities.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars