Prehistoric cave painting, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Renaissance art, Picasso, and invitation to a preview of a Robert Bateman print, children’s art – these are some of the sources of Barry Smylie’s work. In four years Smylie has produced a body of prints that rivals any living Canadian printmaker’s in discovering and appropriating new sources of imagery, adventurousness, and ideas. While many artists follow a single path of development, Smylie moves through many subjects and expressive means, layering his works with personal and historical associations that he combines freely, tying them together with his imagination. His curiosity has led him to explore territories previously little charted in printmaking – most notably that nebulous domain where art and technology meet. Smylie has a rare, complex sensibility: he’s both logical and zany, and his work combines reality and invention.

Smylie settled in Pickering, Ontario, in 1985. His basement studio has an ample work area for the creation of his lithographs, which are all 28.5 x 38.5 centimeters (or vice versa) and for which he uses special lithography stones. The sheer number of his prints – more than fifty in the last four years – is in itself exceptional for a printmaker working in his own studio. His powerful imagination, and magical ability to combine images from different cultures in daring ways is likely to make him one of the important printmakers on the Ontario scene in coming years.

Smylie began his career when he was still in high school in Calgary in 1966. David Carr, a nephew of printmaker John Snow, who was the studio assistant to the printmaker Maxwell Bates, invited him to Snow’s house. That led to a job in the studio for Smylie. ‘I learned practically everything there,’ Smylie recalls.

Bates has suffered a stroke, and though paralyzed and with no short-term memory, was still managing to draw directly on the litho stone. Snow, scraping and adding, would touch up a few details. But Bates’ ability to resgister the print while drawing free-hand was almost perfect, Smylie recalls. Bates’ subject at the time were expressionistically-treated Tarot card readers and the circus, the sort of themes Robertson Davies uses. Once he had an accident in preparing a lithograph for Bates. He picked up a sheet from the proofing table, put it on the stone and ran it through, to discover that he had printed over one of Snow’s prints. In the background, super imposed in a Cubist manner where Snow characters hovering around a Tarot reading table by Bates. This superimposition of one image on top of another later became a dominant concern of Smylie.

After Bates, much o the inspiration for Smylie’s work came from Yves Gaucher, his teacher at Sir George Williams University in Montreal from 1967 to 1971. Gaucher’s geometric concerns led to Smylie’s abandoning various kinds of textures. More important, Gaucher’s desire to control and even transcend the medium made Smylie want to control lithography.

When Smylie left Sir George Williams he continued to simplify the picture plane and flatten the images, as he had been taught by Gaucher. He was beginning to be recognized in Montreal; his work was selling. But he recalls being concerned because ‘I was certain what I was doing wasn’t what I could do.’ What he really wanted to do was understand the ‘stimulus that’s playing on your retina as disconnected from your brain.’

In those years Pop Art was a latent trend of Contemporary Art, and Smylie recalls that it was the first thing he could attach himself to, after Realism. ‘I wanted to modernize Prairie Expressionism, and all Expressionism,’ he says. He returned to Alberta and painted ‘something like Realism,’ he says. He took photographs to document and research the material word; his paintings were idealizations, and a patching together of his photographs and those he found in library books. He studied nature – and the nature of representational painting. Among his subjects he counted the rocky mountains, done on the Eastern slopes, above the tree line at 10,000 feet, where the Group of Seven had rarely traveled. As his work proves, he soon separated himself from realism to pursue a much broader path, using themes from Pop Art.

Pop art has been a common influence in the work of many who matured in the 1960s and ‘70s. What Canadians like Smylie noted most was the way Pop used brand-name objects and the slogans of commercialism. An element of wry social comment had always run through Smylie’s work. Now he added Pop elements. As he said recently, ‘Written language is such an important part of our visual heritage that it almost can’t be ignored.’ In the interview room Smylie pointed out the Salada teas slogan “It’s a Salada” which echoed in my mind, almost like a poem. So did “Chubb Alarm System,” and even the sign that says, “Do not use this door.” He started doing popish art posters of his heroes, like Picasso, with associative literary graphics.

In 1978 Smylie’s paintings began assuming a more eccentric character. His work had moved away from photography. His pictures, done in a combination of graphite and lithography looked like posters. In 1980, a visit to Toronto’s Open Studio, enabled him to translate his drawings into lithography. He noticed that many of his colleagues worked directly on the stone, as had Bates. He still was drawing, then translating his work into lithography. But he realize that he had to work more spontaneously. Back in Calgary he started doing abstracts in conjunction with figurative work. In retrospect he realizes that these abstracts and figurative works where the immediate precursors of the lithograph which are in our show.

In 1983 Smylie dropped everything to go back to what he’d been doing while at university in Montreal away from Bates’ influence but swept by a flood of new perceptions and knowledge. He’s drawing his subjects from his own life, he says. By this, he means his intellectual life, the books he reads, the movies and television he sees, his recollections of interiors, especially the home of John Snow which he remembers as a rich environment, full of art objects.

For his colour, he has used the process of John Snow, enriching the surface with different textural patterns and colours. ‘My colours,’ says Smylie, ‘form a chord, as in music where individual notes make harmonic and atonal structures.’ He adds, ‘Lithograph is my medium but I’ve transcended it.’ This four-year overview shows that he is searching for a definite approach but no final answer. Barry Smylie’s prints are open ended. They offer many possibilities.

Joan Murray