Sold for: $85,250

PROVENANCE
Private Collection, Vancouver

LITERATURE
Ian M. Thom and Andrew Hunter, Gordon Smith: The Act of Painting, Vancouver Art Gallery, 1997, page 27

All creative activity is a balance of opposites: dark and light, individual drive and universal response, masculinity and feminine grace, vigour and ease, force and gentleness, power and humility. These are all fused together in the work of Gordon Smith into genuine works of art.

—Lawren Harris, quoted from an exhibition invitation, circa 1957

In the mid- to late fifties, Vancouver modernist Gordon Smith was painting figurative abstractions with thick black-line grids and more descriptive black-line structures, such as in Cityscape. This use of patterning reflects Smith’s sense of order; the lines act to loosely define the central image, surrounded by abstract colour planes at the top and bottom of the picture plane. The composition is suggestive of a harbour at night, with water, boats and a city floating in the centre, anchored by the lines. Colour drives the spatial experience of the painting, with white and other pale colours pushing the central part of the image forward and creating the illusion of depth. In this tremendously atmospheric painting from the late 1950s, Smith delights the eye with his profuse and inventive forms and their balance between the playfulness of abstract colour areas and the restraint of his linear structure.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars