Squamish #8 (A8), 1985

Mira Godard Gallery, Toronto Private Collection, Ontario

Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, “Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting”, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997, pages 48 and 120

In 1981 Ann Morrison made a film for the CBC on Gordon Smith, documenting the artist on the edge of an artistic transition. Andrew Hunter remarks on Morrison’s documentary: “The film shows Smith in 1981, spending hours out in the landscape, driving through it to work, walking on the beach, cruising in his boat. He wants these spaces to become his paintings, but he wants to break from them as well. He speaks repeatedly of the ‘act of painting’ and a pressing need to break from the horizon line that dominates his landscapes, perhaps the last remnant of the modernist grid.” Smith retired from the University of British Columbia in 1982, and began to travel throughout the province, taking trips into its dense forested landscapes. These trips marked the emergence of a new painterly approach for the artist, as he explored spontaneity. He left behind the tightness of his 1970s work and adopted a more sombre palette. In 1985 Smith visited Shannon Falls, and his compositions took on a vertical form, moving away from the horizontal, as evidenced in “Squamish #8 (A8)”. As Ian M. Thom remarks, “The move to the vertical was continued in a number of landscape images of forest and rock face in the Squamish area. The use of colour was dark and brooding – deep greens, violets, grays and blacks with flashes of brighter red, blues and greens... Here brushwork and colour are used with an abandon perhaps not seen since the work of the early fifties.” This transformation in Smith’s artistic process was also characterized by the use of photographic sources in his work. It allowed him the freedom of improvisation as his work became more abstract, with a suggestion of the landscape.