Gordon Applebe Smith

By the 1960s, Gordon Smith had developed a series of paintings built around a concentrated gathering of organic forms suspended against deep, atmospheric fields of colour. Smith's encounter with Arshile Gorky's work during a 1951 visit to San Francisco has often been cited as an important touchstone for these paintings. In SA 13 Landscape, painterly brushstrokes of earthy greens and deeps blues clash against a black and ochre yellow centre. As quick shards of reds and whites jet out, almost departing from the picture plane, directly towards the viewer. Smith's forms, albeit non-representational, belong to a broader language of biomorphic abstraction, in which the landscape is neither abandoned nor translated into symbols. Like Gorky, Smith discovered that forms drawn from the natural world could remain open, provisional, and deeply felt. Smith's new body of work quickly attracted critical attention. In November 1966, Time magazine reproduced Red Wizard, a closely related canvas from the same series, bringing the paintings to a broad international audience. With its assured composition and commanding use of colour, SA 13 Landscape is a rare example that exemplifies the formal confidence and ambition that established Smith as one of the leading figures in post-war Canadian painting.