I-A from Portfolio A

From a set of six colour serigraphs on wove paper
edition Galerie Agnès Lefort, Montreal, 1968

Mood invades and transforms the shape and the colour of things on the West Coast. Nature injects her kind of poetry into well-meant structures, erodes set patterns and clouds clear issues. Endless sky change and sea-edge mountains impose a presence that no artist can fully escape even in the midst of the city.
Gordon Smith has from the beginning acknowledged the West Coast, grown from it and made it the source of his art. His subiect has really never changed - only become better known to him and by him more clearly shown.
From the refracted mosaic of the early forest landscapes, to the luminous colour of his expressionist micro-landscapes, to his most recent work exploring or fusing both man made and natural forms in a tightly controlled idiom, the same, sometimes haunting, presence is there.
It has to do with his environment but it has also to do with his own qualities of quiet sensivity that makes whatever the new resources of art are, very distinctly his own. His art is never bold or overpowering but restrained when strong, tentative when very sure, stirringly sensitive and with a beauty of colour illuminating each separate work. It was from the struggle to find a more precise expression for his intuition that the present work emerged.
This folio is, in effect, a summing up of the recent years.
It is to me much more - a rich and varied offering of the things of man and of nature that emit their own shimmering aura of being.
Arthur Erickson
February 5, 1968