Gordon Smith
A Painter’s Legacy

Equinox Gallery is pleased to present A Painter’s Legacy, an exhibition of works by the late Canadian artist Gordon Smith (b. 1919, d. 2020). A brilliant painter with an international following, Smith’s style evolved over a lifetime as he made increasingly complex and layered, dense paintings. A prominent figure in a generation of notable West Coast painters, architects, poets, musicians and writers, Smith had an openly inquisitive mind and experimented endlessly in his art making. The unique presence of nature on the Pacific coast was a boundless inspiration to the artist. From the rich forest that surrounded his home and studio in West Vancouver to the shorelines he encountered on trips up and down the coast, Smith produced a vast body of work that alternated between representation and abstraction. It was not the grand vistas nor the broad expanses of nature that attracted Smith, he was drawn to the web of trees, the entanglement of undergrowth, the reflection of a swamp, the snowfall on a branch—the intricacies of how nature functions cyclically and seasonally, through spring, fall and winter.