Issue #24: Summer 2009

Life is Long and Art is Short

by Robin Laurence

Painting is like breathing for acclaimed BC artist Gordon Smith, but he’s not happy with his work.

Picture this. Artist Gordon Smith, at 90, is attending an exhibition opening in a crowded South Granville gallery. The show features new paintings by Gathie Falk, one of Vancouver’s most distinguished senior artists, and Smith – ditto, only more so – is exclaiming over them. “Gathie is wonderful,” he says. “Wonderful.” Although it’s difficult for him to get around these days (nerve damage from an old injury makes it hard now for Smith to lift his right foot, rendering walking a perilous activity), he conscientiously attends art-world events, especially those honouring friends and colleagues.

Still, he’s clearly tired at this moment and wants to get home. As he makes his way through the throng, towards the door, a fan rushes up to him, shakes his hand, and says, “Are you still painting?” In an uncharacteristic burst of incivility, Smith replies, “Are you still breathing?”

Weeks later, in his West Vancouver studio, Smith chuckles a bit ruefully at the memory of this exchange. Still, he reiterates that painting is, for him, truly a compulsion. Not to do it would be unimaginable. To actually like what he’s done, well, that’s apparently unimaginable too. For most of his career, Smith has disparaged his own work. Irrespective of all the solo and survey exhibitions he has racked up, all the critical and curatorial acclaim, all the sales to avid collectors, all the honours and awards and public art commissions, he is chronically dissatisfied with what he has accomplished. He continues to drive himself on and on, through different styles, different series, different realms of colour and composition and brush work.

Doesn’t he feel happy with anything he’s done? “No,” he says, “no, I really don’t.” Then he concedes, “Maybe one or two paintings.” Over a prolific 70-year career, that’s not a hell of a lot. But then one remembers Edgar Degas who is reputed to have said on his deathbed in 1917 that he wished he had all his paintings back so that he could put his boot through them.

Smith’s painting compulsion is not about competing with others, he insists. Instead, it has to do with meeting the demands of some very critical inner being. Meeting them and exceeding them. “I like to be surprised by painting,” he says. “I like ugly paintings – the ones I have to work at looking at.” His recent series, complex interpretations of tangled beach grasses, is “too pretty, too easy,” he remarks. “I look at them and I think, I’m going to start all over again.” And that’s what he’s doing. Right now.

Leaning against the north wall of Smith’s studio is a large canvas, a work-in-progress. In a forceful act of renunciation, he has created it by painting over an earlier work. Where previously there had been starburst ribbons of white, green and buff, there is now a broad, energetic field of black. An array of colour and detail has transformed into a sombre monochrome, although slivers of the original are still evident at the painting’s edges. They glimmer remotely, like starlight from a distant galaxy.

By this act, Smith has launched himself into a re-exploration of the abstract expressionism of the 1950s. He is looking at accidental compositions, such as the rings and splatters on a cloth where his paint pots have been sitting. And he is examining spontaneous self-expression by others, bursts of words and marks such as those in graffiti. He has a file of photos he’s taken of graffiti-covered walls in London and New York. “I really love graffiti.”

It’s often been remarked that Smith is a protean artist, that his paintings have assumed many different shapes, styles and guises over the decades. Ian Thom, senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery and author of the definitive history of Smith’s art, has pointed out that the artist seems to cycle between greater and lesser degrees of abstraction and representation, between looseness and formal control. “He’s always trying to push himself,” Thom observes, then sighs over the amount of art that Smith has destroyed over the years, either by painting over earlier works, throwing them away or burning them. “If he finds himself in a cul-de-sac, he turns around and comes right back out.”

Smith’s 90th birthday in 2009 has been the occasion for yet more honours and awards, including a Governor General’s visual arts award, a fellowship created in his name at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and an exhibition of works on paper at the Artists for Kids Gallery. There have been birthday parties, of course, both public and private, posh and picnicky, including a thronging fete in the courtyard beside the Artists for Kids Gallery. During that hot, sunny, Sunday afternoon, four distinguished speakers praised Smith’s abundant accomplishments as an artist, a teacher (he taught art and art history for 36 years, 26 of them at UBC), a patron of the arts, an enthusiastic supporter of young and emerging artists, a generous friend, and a courageous veteran of the Second World War. (He suffered the injury that now impedes his step, in Sicily during the Allied invasion.)

The tributes were many and long. “Who is this person Gordon Smith?” Gordon Smith demands now. “I’m sick of hearing about him.” It hardly needs repeating that there’s no resting on laurels in his world. With the help of two assistants, Smith recently completed an ambitious public art project for the West Vancouver Aquatic Centre. An immense assemblage of found objects scavenged from West Coast beaches, including driftwood, fishing buoys, plastic netting, roots, branches, a rusty old tire, and frayed pieces of rope, it is a striking summation of our maritime setting. “Gordon causes us to look at our environment in a different way,” Thom says.

Smith has spent the morning cleaning up his studio. He has scrubbed paint pots, covered work tables with clean cloth, and repainted the floor a pristine white. Much as he works compulsively, energetically, every day, he is notorious for maintaining his studio in such extreme order and cleanliness that it could serve as a surgical suite. He groans at the memory of how messy it was while he was working on the Aquatic Centre mural. Then he takes a broom-sized brush and swipes black across the pale face of a rejected painting. Abstraction and representation. Expressiveness and control. Time to forge on.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver writer and art critic.