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SATURDAY EVENING POST
November 11th, 2023
In Honour of Remembrance Day
GORDON SMITH, Untitled, Acrylic on canvas, 2011, 60 x 68 in.
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Gordon Smith, born on June 18, 1919, in Hove, England, stood as one of Canada's most influential and enduring painters, boasting a career that spanned over seven decades. While recognised primarily as a landscape painter, Smith's artistic journey was marked by continuous exploration, showcasing a rich and diverse oeuvre. At the core of his work lies an unwavering love for painting itself, emphasizing texture, color, form, and brushstroke.
In 1990, Smith embarked on a distinctive phase in his career with the creation of the "Black Paintings." Departing from his conventional landscape imagery, these abstract works, often incorporating collaged elements, drew inspiration from his wartime experiences. Wounded at Pachino Beach in Sicily during 1943, Smith's black paintings became a departure from his earlier works, incorporating text, symbolism, and personal content—a departure not present in his landscape pieces.
The black paintings are a testament to Smith's fascination with the visual and tactile qualities of paint. Dense and abstract, these works reveal layers of meaning, with occasional bursts of color, text, and collaged elements. Over time, Smith further abstracted forms, burying memories and biographical associations within layers of paint. This series reflects Smith's belief that painting should be a recreation of experience rather than a mere illustration.
In a 1995 interview, Smith expressed being "100 painters deep," acknowledging the profound influence of other artists on his work. This influence, evident in his "Black Paintings" created between 1991 and 2017, reveals a Rauschenbergian bricolage in the early works, featuring real objects like an entrenching tool or old pyjamas. The inclusion of tangible elements in painting, a modernist trope dating back to Braque, adds thematic content without the burden of representation.
Text becomes another integral element in Smith's lexicon, serving as a form of annotation to guide viewers toward thematic content. Stenciled letters, reminiscent of military usage, appear on the canvas, reinforcing the immediacy and tactility of wartime recollections. The black grounds, interrupted by gestural marks and painted lines, create a visual language that merges abstraction with historical references.
Smith's "Black Paintings" transcend a mere recreation of personal experiences; they become a meeting ground between abstraction and history painting. While anchored in abstraction, they serve as signs of an actual and mythological past. The complex interplay of dark symbolism, personal history, and memorialization adds depth to these somber works. The juxtaposition of representational and non-symbolic blacks in paintings like "War Painting" exemplifies Smith's nuanced approach to organizing visual responses.
ABOVE IMAGES:
Gordon Smith in his studio, top photo by Patrik Andersson, bottom photo by Martin Tessler
Writer, critic and curator of historical and contemporary art Patrik Andersson writes: “The more time we spend with the Black works, we find an artist who, unlike today’s ironist, has a bricoleur ethos in line with artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg who formed their visual economies out of the detritus of their immediate surroundings. And like the Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell, Smith has anchored his poetic sensibility in a war-torn Europe but infused it with the beauty and pathos of life on the West Coast of Canada. Conversations with artists like Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Jack Shadbolt who all saw nature as a motif able to access the spectres of history percolate to the surface of these works. All references and inspirations aside, Smith establishes his own aesthetic territory that conflates his most traumatic moments with that of sublime aesthetic revelations. Just as brush strokes, drips and colour can evoke specific encounters with art, so do dates, names and objects call up a more personal inventory of events… If, as some have argued, repression and pessimism were at the core of Sigmund Freud’s black-and-white analysis of intention and expression, Gordon Smith’s…practice, which revels in the transformation of memory and vision into concrete objects, puts a positive and dialectical spin on our interior and exterior relationship to the world.”
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