Senior Specialist Rob Cowley discusses Winter Forest M by Gordon Smith

Gordon Appelbe Smith has been a significant figure in Canadian art from the 1950s to the present. Smith’s diverse and inventive oeuvre encompasses printmaking, sculpture, assemblage and photography, though the artist’s commitment to painting was paramount. Born in England in 1919, Smith settled in Canada in 1933. In 1951, Smith studied with Elmer Bischoff at the California School of Fine Arts. This proved to be a pivotal, formative experience. Bischoff helped to introduce Smith to action painting, encouraging him to work spontaneously with large, unwieldy brushes and house paint on large sheets of canvas laid out on the floor. Prolific and experimental, Smith’s painting career was marked by a series of creative breakthroughs that manifested as distinct shifts in his visual style over the course of his artistic career.

While exploring various modes of abstraction, Smith also returned repeatedly to the influence of the West Coast. Smith’s love of the land remained consistent throughout his life, and the artist continually incorporated this vital subject into his work. The artist’s experiences of time spent in the vast forests of British Columbia provided rich inspiration. Art historian Andrew Hunter noted that in the early 1980s, Smith “travelled throughout British Columbia and into the dense forest landscapes of the province… Smith found his new bridge, and he made a breakthrough. Like Emily Carr before him, Smith wandered out into the wilderness and found his voice… Smith was renewed: the vigour and intensity of his painting, the inquisitiveness that marked his first probings into abstraction in the 1950s, returned.”

Through the act of painting, Smith transformed the forest into an imaginative and ambiguous space, which he used as an armature for his painterly concerns. Winter Forest M depicts a closely cropped, snowy thicket. Light pours down in a column from the top centre, creating a visual opening in the undergrowth. The painting offers startingly different experiences when viewed from a distance or in close proximity. From several steps back, the image appears solidly realist and meticulously rendered. Up close, the loose, energetic brushstrokes of Winter Forest M become wonderfully vital and chaotic. The full range of colours in the work is also revealed. On the subject of Smith’s forest paintings, Hunter wrote: “I imagine Smith in the space of the painting, watching him move, thrusting and drawing back, stumbling and wiping, and try to imagine the associations—the pressing weight of moist cedar bows, wet snow heavy on the foliage, the tension on the arching branches as the pure white mass holds them down, forming a canopy over the decaying undergrowth.”