Sold for: $145,250

PROVENANCE
Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, British Columbia
By descent to the present Private Collection, British Columbia

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997, page 50

Gordon Smith’s Untitled IW is a large-scale, magisterial work of great beauty. The roots of this painting lie in the mid-to-late 1980s, when Smith made trips to Haida Gwaii - the last to Tanu in 1987. His paintings of this time were abstractions of dark, brooding forests, dominated by hues of green and brown. Smith stated his intent in these works was “to use the color of the forest, and moss green and burnt umber, but use them as a way of showing the change in brushstroke…I’m not trying to capture a landscape, per se. I want people to see the paint. Before it’s a rock or a tree, it’s a painting.”

The lesson of the importance of paint itself was absorbed by Smith at the California School of Art in San Francisco in 1951. His instructor was American painter Elmer Bischoff, who challenged Smith to open up and get into the act of painting. During his time there, he was exposed to the work of American Abstract Impressionists such as Clyfford Still, Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn. He stated, “Abstract Expressionism…taught me the quality of paint.” Fired by his discoveries, Smith returned to Vancouver, and became an important part of a group of modernist artists on the West Coast such as Jack Shadbolt and B.C. Binning.

Untitled IW also relates to Smith’s Shannon Falls works of 1984, vertical compositions of forest and rock with slashes of white water falling through the centre. But though these traces of the past can be detected, Untitled IW is evidence of Smith’s evolution. The Tanu works could be roughly painted, while Untitled IW shows a fineness in its brushwork, handling of paint and colour, and definition of form. At the bottom of the canvas are square shapes suggesting doorways, more strongly delineated in the right hand square, more amorphous to the left. Glowing white, suggestive of snow, descends through the core of the painting, dramatically contrasted with the darker hues. This use of white was further developed in subsequent works, like the Pond series, and his depictions of forest floors in winter. Smith enlivens the deep earth tones present here with vibrant peach, pink and ochre and sparks of red and blue. The more closely you examine the painting, the more colour emerges from the depths.

In the centre of the painting, a strong vertical element resembling a section of tree trunk anchors the work, topped by two softly rounded forms. Smith’s use of trailing lines of dripping paint, suggestive of rain, bring the eye back to the surface, and re-establish the primacy of paint. Smith’s brushwork and handling of space is sophisticated, and there is a sense of fluctuation between the dark and light areas that creates movement and dimensionality. Untitled IW moves fluidly between landscape and abstraction, yet, first and foremost, as Smith intended, we see the extraordinary qualities of its painted surface.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars

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