Inside Vancouver
Still Life
By Michael Harris published Jun 1, 2009
More than half a century of work has made Gordon Smith one of Canada’s great painters. Now, at 90, he feels he may finally be hitting his stride
The painter Gordon Smith is missing a masterpiece—that is what makes him great. His studio is a site of constant struggle, revision, and head-shaking deferral. He has a hopeful way of walking there, though, with his cane, like a mechanical toy. And he paints there four hours every day. Ninety years old this month, he only now thinks he’s getting somewhere.
As a side effect of this struggle, Smith—like Jack Shadbolt or Takao Tanabe—has taught a generation of Canadians how to look at their landscape. There’s the Order of Canada, too, and murals in embassies, and paintings in the National Gallery. But Smith remains unsatisfied. His voice, rattled with age, is marked by the questioning lilt of the autodidact. (A determined self-educator since his youth, he’s always felt the people surrounding him were better schooled.) He’s constantly derailing conversations that focus on him, turning the talk toward others.
All that outward searching (his whole career, really) begins in a rented house just south of London. There’s Donald, the older brother, at 16. There’s young Gordon, just 14. And there’s their mother, Daisy, saying, “You mustn’t tell your father, but we’re going away.” The father, William, was a financial failure. But perhaps that’s unfair: it was 1933—the world was a financial failure. He could barely provide for the family; they took in boarders to make ends meet. When not working—as a shopkeeper up in London—William liked to paint landscapes. He was a great admirer of Turner and showed the master’s paintings to his boys on trips to the metropolis. Behind their house there stood a rickety shed, the sort you might keep firewood in; this was William’s studio.
Painting didn’t feed hungry mouths, though. Daisy packed the boys up one day and, at 4 o’clock, took them to Mrs. Butler’s place down the street. The boys were wearing their grammar school blazers and toted small bags. William returned from his shift in London on the 6 o’clock train, as usual, to find himself abandoned. He would never see his wife again. Nor would he ever see Donald.
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Painting didn’t feed hungry mouths, though. Daisy packed the boys up one day and, at 4 o’clock, took them to Mrs. Butler’s place down the street. The boys were wearing their grammar school blazers and toted small bags.
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