Sold for: $26,325

PROVENANCE
A gift from the Artist to the present Private Collector, Vancouver

Since the mid-1990s, Gordon Smith has been painting ponds as subjects. He works from both memories and photographs, as evidenced by the title of this stunning painting. In these works, Smith is fascinated by shifting fields of space, and in the interplay between landscape elements and abstraction. Water, trees, sky and branches are also pattern, light, lines and planes. The pond reflects what is above and at its perimeter in a softly shifting, wavering reflection, reading as both negative and positive space. From a dense criss-crossing entanglement at the water’s edge, graceful thin, wavy branches emerge, making delicate patterns against the pale centre that holds the reflection of the sky. Smith is always aware of paint itself and, on close viewing, in the density of branches are many strokes of luscious colours, such as mauve, green and blue. In this visual poem, the viewer feels delight in how the senses read space first one way and then another, and in how nature’s patterns of growth, seemingly random, have their own innate balance and beauty.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars