Gordon Smith: The Printed Pictures

At the Burnaby Art Gallery to March 7

Gordon Smith is an acclaimed painter of tremendous talent and energy. This survey exhibition at the Burnaby Art Gallery reveals the senior Vancouver artist to be an equally accomplished and prolific printmaker. Whether working in serigraphy, lithography, wood engraving, or etching, Smith reveals the same ability to explore different styles and forms as he does in his painting studio. Of the estimated 200 print editions he has created over his 70-year career, 49 works are on view here. They fill the gallery, upstairs and down.

Most of Smith’s prints have been created in dialogue with his paintings. Both bodies of work range back and forth between abstraction and representation, looseness and control. From brushy landscapes to hard-edge and op art, and from hand-drawn studies of old shoes and worn gloves to photo-based images of misshapen bicycle tires and tangled spokes, Smith’s prints reveal his many formal interests and undertakings. They also suggest a constant tussle, not only between the expressionistic and the cerebral but also between the broad and the particular.

The earliest work on view, a small drypoint created in 1945 and titled The Ironing, is unusual in that it is figurative. It is also poignant. The subject, a woman standing at a table pressing a shirt, is Smith’s wife of 68 years, Marion. Marion Smith died a month ago, at the age of 90, but her presence is strongly felt here. Among her myriad involvements, she often assisted her husband in the production of his innovative silkscreen prints. In interviews, Smith has freely acknowledged her profound impact on his career. She was, he has said, his first and most important critic.

Although Smith’s silkscreen investigations of optical art during the 1960s demonstrate a great capacity for invention, intricacy, and precision, they hold less appeal for me than his later, more expressive readings of the West Coast landscape. Exceptions are Stripe of Purple and Blue Stripe, whose palette is lush and seductive. These works demonstrate what a sensuous colourist Smith can be—despite his stated preference for the dark and muddy hues of the northern rainforest.

Among the most subtly engaging works here is Porlier, a 1974 etching whose faint, scratchy lines claim a place in space somewhere between landscape, mindscape, and musical notation. Also marvellous is Iselis’ Bird, a 1991 drypoint of a downward-plunging, avian form that makes deft use of the velvety-black lines and burrlike markings characteristic of that medium.

The forest landscapes of 2002-04 are lovely and evocative works, playing dark and brooding abstraction against light-filled representation. But—and this is an indication that Smith continues to grow and better himself as an artist—two of the most impressive works in the show are among the most recent. LG III, a photo-etching with chine-collé and drypoint, creates a striking composition out of old, bent pieces of metal.

And Tangle I, a hand-drawn etching, is a dense, mesmerizing web of fine white lines on a rich brown ground. Where multiple lines coincide, starry forms emerge, as if from a brilliant night sky. This all-over abstraction compels the eye, mind, and spirit in a way that is almost transcendent.