Sold for: $49,250

PROVENANCE
Equinox Gallery, Vancouver
Private Collection, Vancouver

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

Throughout the 1990s, Gordon Smith continued to move back and forth between abstraction and the landscape. As his fellow Vancouver modernist painter Jack Shadbolt commented, Smith had found his “true lyric territory.” Smith’s inspiration was coming from landscapes he found close at hand, such as the subject of this magnificent painting, Cypress Mountain, which is not far from his North Shore studio. In it we can make out a rock, a stream, tree trunks and the green of the inner forest. But what is of equal importance here is what surpasses our immediate observation of the elements of the subject. Smith’s handling of paint and his impressions of the forest come to the fore.

The sheer physicality of Smith’s expressive brushwork is pleasurable to contemplate. Smith turns the elements of the scene into loosely defined and balanced planes of colour. Swathes of deep emerald green and earthy brown are contrasted by flashes of cobalt blue, orange and the frothing white of the stream. And this is just the predominant impact - on closer examination, smudges and strokes of diverse colours such as grey, turquoise and yellow emerge. Just on the basis of colour alone, this painting is a lush and beautiful work. Taken as a whole, Cypress Forest is an exceptionally fine West Coast modernist work in its treatment of space and the qualities of paint itself.

Smith’s importance as a West Coast modernist in the context of Canadian landscape painting has been definitively established through many museum solo and retrospective exhibitions. He is part of a generation of Vancouver artists that included influential leaders such as Jack Shadbolt and B.C. Binning, whose work was on the leading edge of their time. While he was a teacher at the Vancouver School of Art and at the University of British Columbia, Smith influenced emerging artists and art educators. He continues to be a passionate supporter of the arts community and is a respected luminary of the Vancouver art scene.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars