Gordon Smith

Gordon Smith’s chilly scenes of winter seem oddly out of season during Vancouver’s Indian summer. But Smith’s large acrylic paintings—nine of which are on display in the gallery’s main room, with seven more upstairs—are resolute in their dedication to a style that, because it is not fashionable, is also never out of date. Smith, now eighty-nine years old, is one of the West Coast’s last standing modernists; he is a painter whose canvases’ vitality, scope, and interplay of surface and depth belie not just his age but also any pat declarations of painterly modernism’s demise. Dialectics of form and seasonal chronology pervade the work, as in North Shore Winter #4 (all works 2008), a surface of black and white branches, behind and above which are drooping evergreen boughs, snow laden and lush. The central foliage, deciduous and often formed by single lines of white paint, contrasts with its coniferous counterparts’ thick clusters of needles, depicted carrying more of the snow’s weight. There is play here—as in many of the works—between an abstract, almost Pollock-like foreground and a representational background. In Roger’s Pass #2, the whiteness of the icy scene—of the paint—fails to conceal the green, yellow, and even purple blue of late autumn’s vestigial leaves. Finally, the works’ titles, with their minimal numbers, derive from real sites: The North Shore, where Smith resides in West Vancouver, and Roger’s Pass, traversing the Rocky Mountains hundreds of miles to the east, are similarly rough terrain—landscapes that are sublime and untamed enough that, every year, hikers, snowboarders, and other venturers end up lost, rescued, or sometimes dead. The resulting melancholy in Smith’s exhibition can be read as that of the modernist, or the aging artist, or perhaps even the season. What is most impressive about Smith’s work is that its elegiac tone can never be pinned down, can never be read as simply biographical, or art historical, or even Romantic-pastoral. Viewers keep looking, in the presence of these paintings, and keep finding.