Gordon Smith's 'Black Paintings'

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Gordon Smith in his studio in 2009 (photo by Martin Tessler).

Gordon Smith’s fifth exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Black Paintings, on view until Feb. 4, marks a full-circle return to the days of his youth. In Pachino 43, for instance, Smith paints on tarpaulin from the kitbag he used when he was a Second World War intelligence officer drawing maps from photographs. He landed on Sicily’s Pachino Penisula as part of Operation Husky, the launch of the Allied campaign in Italy, a test and precursor to D-Day, and was shot in the leg on July 20, 1943 at the Sicilian town of Leonforte.

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Gordon Smith, "Pachino 43," 1993

acrylic on tarpaulin (collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, gift of Leon and Joan Tuey, VAG 97.71, photo by Rachel Topham, VAG)

Smith is known for his West Coast forest interiors and landscapes, and like Claude Monet, in his later work at Giverny, has moved from a mix of figuration and abstraction to a more abstract, process-oriented style, even as he refers to scenes he has experienced. Painting remains a daily ritual, even at 98, and his recent paintings, which he calls Entanglements, are a sometimes chaotic, sometimes beautiful admixture of surface effects and suggested scenes.

The Black Paintings are an altogether different initiative. Begun in 1990, and continuing to this day, they recall the experience of war Smith shared with young friends from the Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg, from training in England to the war in Sicily. Though dark, even brooding at times, the work affirms one of the most vivid periods in Smith’s life. An earlier series of Black Paintings were lost or stolen but he returned to the theme, developing the sense of darkness and immeasurable, infinite space. Tanu (1995) captures that darkness, and though named after a village on Haida Gwaii, could equally recall Smith’s wartime experiences in Sicily.

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Gordon Smith, "Tanu," 1995

acrylic on canvas (collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund, VAG 96.13, photo courtesy Vancouver Art Gallery)

The Black Paintings, as curator Ian Thom has observed, have something of the character of Robert Rauschenberg’s daring assemblage and collage techniques, where real-life elements are tagged in, painted over, or simply set atop a painting to provide autobiographical references. Some items can be readily seen, while others are buried under dense textures of paint. These fragments, which include an old kit bag, a metal circle, a grill and pyjamas, are complemented with numbers and stencil-like words, such as Husky and Pachino, to bring an immediacy and tactility to his wartime remembrances. In the midst these memory collages are bursts of colour, as in A Time Remembered (2016), one of the show’s strongest and most resolved works. The colours here are like anti-aircraft fire in the night sky.

These paintings have no answers. They do not confirm the human condition. Instead, they are expansive, ephemeral, dark and unreal. Some have Pollock-like drippings, or even thin vertical bands of colour that extend the full height of the canvas. Such works recall the lyrical abstraction Smith knew as a fledgling painter studying at the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, in the 1950s. After viewing Arshile Gorky’s paintings, Smith brought a pile of paintings made using only black to his instructor. He was told: “Gordon, you can always turn them over and paint the other side of them.”

Talking now about the present Black Paintings, Smith affirms what he thought back in his San Francisco days: “They say it’s not a colour, but I love black!”