Gordon Smith was an important part of the early modernist scene in Vancouver, dating back to the 1950s - along with such artists as Lawren Harris, Jack Shadbolt and B.C. Binning. Up until his passing earlier in 2020, Smith continued to innovate, and transitioned through many thoughtful and vital changes in his work, inspiring artists on the West Coast and across Canada.

The artist did not have to go far to find his inspiration in the natural environment. Cypress Mountain rose behind Smith’s studio and home on the west shore of Vancouver, easily accessible by car. In this remarkable painting, he contemplated the forest floor at the edge of a clearing, with bare twigs and branches emerging from snow in the foreground and at the top, a strip of evergreen foliage. Some of the thin branches are dark and defined, others almost ghostly - criss-crossing in a web of mark-making. Smith does not go too deeply into space, preferring to closely observe the spatial changes created by fallen wood and small openings, and the exquisite way the snow covers the ground in soft clumps. His paintwork was adept, as he moved from the light-generating snow in the foreground, which reads like an abstract colour field, upward into the darker passage of evergreen vegetation at the top of the canvas. Delicately modulated colours give definition to the snow in pale blue, grey, with touches of pink and yellow. Smith explored closeup views of nature, some more abstract, some less, for decades in his Snow, Pond and Entanglement series. Cypress Mountain exhibits the sublime painterly vocabulary Smith accumulated over a lifetime, as he fluctuates back and forth between the abstract and the natural with great sensitivity.

Please note: this work is unframed.