Gordon Smith was one of the consummate modernist painters of the Pacific Northwest, with an oeuvre ranging in style and approach but never wavering from his commitment to the possibilities of painting. While his earliest work took the form of landscape and still life, beginning in the early 1950s, he drifted into realms of abstraction that would have been rare sights in Vancouver at the time. He moved through distinct periods of Abstract Expressionism and hard-edge, constantly teetering between austere organization and controlled chaos, with the ghostly impression of the landscape never fully disappearing from his canvases.

In Old Growth Pacific Rim, completed in 2006, we see Smith returning to the landscape after traversing a career-long thicket of stylistic divergences, emerging with a hybrid that lyrically captures nature’s fundamental entanglements. In close conversation with both Claude Monet and Jackson Pollock, the spindly twigs of the coastal old-growth forest become an all-over motif that consumes the canvas and envelops the viewer, articulating the dense, luxuriant growth of the temperate rain forest.