Artist Biography & Facts

Gordon Appelbe Smith

The following obituary is from the Vancouver Sun newspaper.

"Beloved B.C. artist Gordon Smith dies at home in West Vancouver: The long-time artist, whose name graced the Gordon Smith Gallery of Canadian Art in North Vancouver, was 100 years old"
KEVIN GRIFFIN    Updated: January 20, 2020

Gordon Smith, B.C.’s most-beloved artist, has died. He was 100.

Smith died at about 9:30 p.m. on Saturday in his home in West Vancouver, said Andy Sylvester, owner of the Equinox Gallery that represented Smith for many years.

“It was an enormous privilege to know him and experience his enthusiasm and brilliance as an artist and educator and generosity as a human being,” Sylvester said Sunday.

Sylvester said Smith kept working as an artist until Christmas 2018.

“Up to 99 he was still doing drawings,” Sylvester said.

But when he could no longer make it into his studio to work every day, he lost the enthusiasm to keep going.

“He’d gone to the studio daily for almost 70 years,” Sylvester said. “He compared it to being a top athlete: if you’re not inspired that day, you still need to practise.”

Smith was born in East Brighton, England, in 1919 and came to Canada in 1933 to Winnipeg. Before going overseas to fight in the Second World War with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he came out west to Vancouver where he married Marion Fleming. The couple together founded the Gordon and Marion Smith Foundation for Young Artists, which continues to support art education for students.

Ian Thom probably knew Smith’s work better than anyone. He’s the author of Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting and the former historical curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

He said Smith’s passing is a “very sad day for Canada and B.C.

“Gordon’s death is a blow to the thousands who knew and admired him and is especially so for those who were lucky enough to count him (as) a friend,” Thom said Monday by email.

Thom said as an artist, Smith’s relationship to nature remained central as he explored abstraction in his paintings and drawings.

“He was, by example and deed, one of the most ardent supporters of art and art education in B.C.,” Thom said.

In addition to Smith’s career teaching at the University of B.C. and the countless workshops, lectures and presentations he gave, he supported art galleries and arts organizations such as Artists for Kids and Arts Umbrella.

“He was also a keen supporter of the work of other artists — whether visiting their exhibitions, buying their work, sometimes giving them financial aid or simply encouraging them,” Thom said.

Thom believes that that the totality of Smith’s “achievement is remarkable and will be … lasting in importance to the province and country.

“He was a major painter, a major printmaker, a legendary teacher, an important visual arts supporter and philanthropist, and a truly wonderful man of enormous grace and kindness,” Thom said.

Artist and friend Ian Wallace said after Smith retired from teaching he established friendships with younger artists and people who helped keep his artistic vision “very fresh and alive.”

“As an artist, his brush was alive to the very end,” Wallace said. “There was always something completely moving and inspiring about every move that he made, every gesture of the brush. That’s what comes across in his work and still inspires younger artists today.”

Wallace, who is on the board of the couple’s foundation, said Smith had a lifelong interest in passing on the creative tradition to younger artists. Wallace said he recently discovered a chapter on children’s art written by Smith in a Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) publication marking the province’s centenary in 1958.

“He contributed a visionary chapter on the importance of children’s art in that catalogue,” he said. “Creativity and art and all the meanings it can give to people to enrich their lives was a gift and he wanted to pass that gift on.”

Smith was raised in the suburbs of London in a family that encouraged painting. His father, William, was an amateur painter. As a youngster, Smith visited Britain’s National Gallery and the Tate where the atmospheric paintings of J.M.W. Turner particularly interested him.

Due to domestic problems on the home front, his mother, Daisy, left England with Smith and his brother in 1933. Within five years Smith was taking classes in the Winnipeg School of Art.

In 1939, Smith went on a road trip that had a big influence on him. He travelled by bus to the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. When he saw paintings by Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Henry Matisse, as well as the Group of Seven and Emily Carr, he realized there was a much bigger world of art.

During the Second World War he initially worked as an intelligence officer making topographic drawings for platoon commanders. In 1943, he was sent to join the Allied invasion of Sicily. During the fighting his right leg was badly damaged. It was an injury that bothered him for the rest of his life.

In 1944, he returned home to Canada, worked for a while in the advertising department of The Vancouver Sun, and had his first show in the VAG.

In 1951 he travelled for a second time to San Francisco to study painting at the California Institute of Fine Art. One day in class the instructor told students to put their canvas on the floor and start playing around with paint.

“It was the best damn thing that happened, it was a real shock treatment,” he told The Sun in 2007. “It was a wonderful experience, something that helped me loosen up my painting.”

By 1955 Smith felt that he really had absorbed all that he learned in San Francisco four years earlier. That year, he won the First Biennial of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery in Ottawa.

He taught for 26 years in the faculty of education at the University of B.C. until retiring in 1982.

Daina Augaitis, interim director at the VAG, said Smith had a long history of being deeply involved in the artistic life of Vancouver.

“As an artist, friend and philanthropist, he touched the lives of thousands,” she said by email. “To be engaged and stay relevant for over seven decades is phenomenal.”

Smith is the recipient of many honours and awards. They include the Order of Canada in 1996 and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2007.

The Equinox Gallery said a memorial gathering for Smith will be announced.

GORDON APPELBE SMITH RCA,BCSA,CGP, CPE, OC (b. 1919)

Gordon  Smith is an expressionist and geometric abstract painter, muralist and sculptor who was born in Hove, England and has lived in Canada since 1933; first in Winnipeg, and since 1940 in Vancouver.  His mediums include oil, acrylic, watercolour, pencil, silkscreen, etching and mix mediums.  His subjects include landscape, cityscape and pure abstract.  As stated his styles are abstract expressionist, geometric abstract, cubist, realist and expressionist.

He studied at the Winnipeg School of Art, under Lemoine Fitzgerald, and the Vancouver School of Art, graduating in 1946.  He also taught at the Vancouver School of Art and was a Professor at the University of British Columbia from 1956 until his retirement (from teaching) in 1982.  His travels include, the USA, Europe, South America, Japan and Egypt.  It should also be noted he served in combat in World War II (1940 - 44) and still limps from wounds he received in Italy.

His first show was with the Manitoba Society of Artists in 1937; he has been showing his work almost continuously since then; including several one  man shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Greater Victoria Art Gallery and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  He has also shown at the Sao Paulo Biennial (1960), the Seattle World's Fair (1962), and the Osaka World's Fair (1970): and with the Ontario Society of Artists, the Canadian Group of Painters (president 1957 - 58) and the Royal Canadian Academy.  He is still very active (2009) creating and showing large (60" X 60" or larger) expressionist  paintings and installations inspired by scenery in West Vancouver, where he has lived since 1953.

According to the Canadian Heritage Information Network* and individual museum websites, his works are in the permanent collections of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston, Ontario), Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (B.C.), Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax), Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, New Brunswick), Carleton University Art Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario), Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum (Charlottetown, P.E.I.), Dalhousie Art Gallery (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Doris McCarthy Gallery (University of Toronto, Ontario), Kamloops Art Gallery (B.C.), Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery (Concordia University, Montreal), Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina, Saskatchewan), Maltwood Museum (University of Victoria, B.C.), McMaster Museum of Art (Hamilton, Ontario), McMichael Canadian Art Collection (Kleinburg, Ontario), Mendel Art Gallery (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan), Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art (Quebec), Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Quebec), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (University of British Columbia, Vancouver), Museum London (Ontario), Ottawa Art Gallery (Ontario), Owens Art Gallery (Sackville, N.B.), Quebec Museum of Fine Arts (Quebec City), Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa, Ontario), Simon Fraser University Gallery (Burnaby, B.C.), Tate (London, England), Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (Owen Sound, Ontario), Trent University Art Collection (Peterborough, Ontario), University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (Lethbridge, Alberta), Vancouver Art Gallery (B.C.), Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies (Banff, Alberta), Winnipeg Art Gallery (Manitoba) and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa).

His work is also in numerous corporate and private collections, and and his murals are in public spaces such as the Queen Elizabeth theatre (Vancouver) and Simon Fraser University (Burnaby B.C.).

His awards include First Prize at the Biennial of Canadian Art (1955), a senior fellowship from the Canada Council (1960), Honorary Doctorate from Simon Fraser University (1973), Professor Emeritus from the University of British Columbia (1983), Honorary Doctorate from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (1995) and the Order of Canada (1996).

As one of Canada's most prominent artists his work is discussed in most books on Canadian art history and Canadian modern art.  There are also dozens of magazine and Newspaper stories. In addition there is the book GORDON SMITH The Act of Painting (1997) by Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, published by Douglas & McIntyre and The Vancouver Art Gallery  (161 pages, colour and black and white photos). He is also listed in Who's Who in American Art, 1982; A Dictionary of Canadian Artists (1974), by Colin S. MacDonald, published by Canadian Paperbacks Ltd.; and The Collector's Dictionary of Canadian Artists at Auction (2001), by Anthony R. Westbridge and Diana L. Bodnar, published by Westbridge Publications Ltd.

Source:
Prepared and submitted by M.D.Silverbrooke