Artist’s black paintings aren’t always dark
Gordon Smith’s Black Paintings a record of wartime memories
Gordon Smith’s black paintings are, not surprisingly, predominantly black. But for Smith, black isn’t necessarily about dark and destructive emotions.
Many of his black paintings are associated with the years he spent in the Second World War as an intelligence officer drawing maps from photographs. As a result, the black in his black paintings came to be seen as evoking feelings of loss and death during wartime.
But that’s not all that’s going on with black for Smith whose black paintings are being shown in an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
As an artist, there is a much more prosaic reason for choosing black: he likes it.
“I love black as a colour,” Smith said in an interview in the studio of his West Vancouver home.
He lives in a beautiful Arthur Erickson post-and-beam house, where vast expanses of windows blur the line between inside and outside on a secluded, forested site.
Smith, now 98, still gets up every day to paint. He was emphatic that every day really means “every day” and that includes Saturdays and Sundays and Christmas Day.
“It’s part of my life,” he said about painting. “It’s like breathing.”
Smith is one of B.C.’s most celebrated artists. Ten years ago in 2007, he was the recipient of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 1996, he was awarded the Order of Canada.
For Smith, black is sometimes simply the best colour to choose for a painting. In the exhibition at the VAG, the painting Tanu, for example, is named after a village on Haida Gwaii. If you’ve ever gone for a walk or run in the rainforest on an overcast day, you’ll recognize black as an entirely appropriate colour to represent the kind of dark, shaded spaces beneath towering cedars and Douglas firs. In the painting, a gesture of white against a background of black and green recalls sunlight breaking through dark underbrush.
Although there are figurative elements in Smith’s work in the VAG exhibition, most of the paintings are abstract. He started exploring the physical qualities of paint as a young artist in the 1950s while at the California Institute of Fine Art in San Francisco. An instructor told students to put the canvas on the floor and start playing around with paint. It was exactly the kind of shock treatment Smith needed to loosen up his work.
Today, Smith works from a wheelchair covered with bits of paint. Before the wheelchair, he used a cane to support himself. The equipment, and assistance he needed in walking, makes one aware of the physicality of his body. Earlier in the interview, he gestured to the brace he wears on his right leg — the legacy of a war-time injury of more than 70 years ago.
It happened on July 20, 1943, when he was shot through a nerve in his leg on Pachino Beach in Sicily. Smith was part of Operation Husky, the codename for the Allied invasion that began the Italian campaign.
Amazingly, a war photographer recorded Smith lying on his back on the beach in Italy that day. The photograph, which hangs in Smith’s office, shows him being attended to by a medic.
After the injury, Smith was evacuated on a troop ship to North Africa that came under fire. By January 1944, he arrived in Vancouver.
The turning point in Smith’s personal experience of the Second World War is recalled in Pachino 43, one of 25 works in the exhibition. Tarpaulin from the kitbag he used in Italy is the surface of the painting instead of canvas. Mostly abstract, with gestures of red and white on the dark surface, the painting has two literal, figurative elements on its surface: the word Pachino written in khaki-coloured stencil and a larger white 43 painted close by.
Although it’s easy to read the black as expressing a dark period in Smith’s life, the brighter colours and gestures suggest something beyond the destruction of war.
Smith said his memories of the Second World War aren’t all about loss. Smith, who was born in East Brighton, England, and then emigrated with his mother and brother to Winnipeg, described the Second World War as an experience that produced wonderful memories.
In the book Gordon Smith: Don’t Look Back, Smith recalled being on a troopship waiting to land in Italy. At night, he went above deck to watch the glowing sea and the shadowy shapes of the ships against the dark sky.
“I would think what a great adventure it was ... ,” he said.
“We were a group of special friends who had been together for three years from the early days at Fort Osborne barracks in Winnipeg to the years of training in the south of England.”
His group of friends included Birtie, D’Arcy, Bucko, Steve, Stu and Corky. Most were 23 or younger.
“I still clearly see their faces and hear their voices — there has been no time in my life that has meant so much. Some of us lived on, some did not. When I am alone, I think of these dear friends and weep, and after all these years the memory is as fresh as ever.”