ARTIST: Gordon Smith Linister (Missouri, Illinois, 1938 - 2018)
NAME: Still Life
YEAR: 1963
MEDIUM: oil on canvas
CONDITION: Some craquelure. No visible inpaint under UV light.
SIGHT SIZE: 20 x 24 inches / 50 x 60 cm
FRAME SIZE: 24 x 28 inches / 60 x 71 cm
SIGNATURE: lower right and on verso
CATEGORY: antique vintage painting
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SKU#: 121139
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BIOGRAPHY:
G. Linister Smith's art is sometimes likened to that of Rembrandt and also to that of Salvador Dali. He acknowledges both as strong influences and, in the manner of both, signs his work "Linister" the single most distinctive name of those given him at birth.He was born October 17, 1938 in Long Beach, California where his father, a U.S. Navy seaman, was stationed. His parents, L. Gordon Smith, an enlistee from Jacksonville, North Carolina and Mildred (Jordan) Smith, then recently from Ohio, had met on a footbridge in Long Beach.His paternal ancestors, independent seafarers all, had settled in the remote coastal Jacksonville, N.C. area in early colonial days. The family, believed to have been mostly Irish, acquired substantial landholdings there, most of which (10,000 acres) were government-acquired when the U.S. Marines decided to create Camp Lejeune in the late 1930s (construction officially began May 1, 1941; the date the land was vacated).Linister says that he decided to be an artist at about his age 11. By then he had lived in several cities and states as his father's home ports then frequently changed. He recalls seeing very little of his father in all his growing-up years, the first six having been WWII years. By the time he graduated from High School at Florida's Miami-Edison High in 1957, he had attended a total of 17 different schools, up and down both U.S. coasts.His first two years of High School were in Bellflower (Los Angeles), California, and the last two were at Miami Edison where he studied art with Mr. Charles King - a teacher in both private and public schools. Earlier, when in grade school, he had spotted an ad for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the back of an issue of The National Scholastic (a weekly newspaper circulated in High Schools all over America at that time) and resolved at that young age to go there someday.But it turned out that he first would serve a four-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy from 1957-61. Most of those four years were aboard a ship where he ran the boilers'a strategic yet dangerous job. This was on a Heavy Cruiser out of the port of Norfolk, Virginia. After mustering out, he bought a motorcycle and went home to Jacksonville, N.C. for a few months before taking a bus bound for Chicago. He would stay there for the next eight years returning home twice; once to retrieve his motorcycle.He enrolled for one semester at the Chicago Art Institute, found it not much to his liking, and did not return for a second semester. Instead he sought out a teacher well-regarded by friends and studied then for a year with Rudolf Penn, who taught a class three nights a week in his studio. There Linister learned how to paint and how best to use color in his art. That concluded his formal schooling. Thereafter he would make and sell his art for a -living. Happily, it sold well - especially in summer art fairs, but he routinely lost weight in winter months when money for food was often scarce.In 1969 he exhibited for the first time at Kansas City's Plaza Art Fair - a September event that fills the streets of the city's famed Country Club Plaza with artists and art. On that first visit to Kansas City, he all but sold out the work he had brought. The weekend so impressed him that he returned to Chicago, packed up and moved to Kansas City where, at this 2016 writing, he still lives and works - some 47 years later. The youthful nomad had found a permanent home.Linister has had several one-man shows in public museums - most notably at the Albrecht-Kemper in St. Joseph, Missouri in 1975 and in several North Carolina museums. In Kansas City he early on met Thomas Hart Benton and his wife Rita, who was famed for taking young artists under wing and then selling their art to her stable of wealthy customers. Linister was no different. He fit the mold.Linister has often lectured to audiences interested in art. He also is a valued consultant on the subjects of materials, varnishes and chemicals necessary to better assure permanency in paintings. For example, he mixes his own painting medium using stand oil and mineral spirits, having earlier developed an allergy to turpentine.He ascribes his interest in these details to time spent in the holds of great ships making sure boilers operated at precise pressures and temperatures. He learned in the Navy to use only the finest materials. It was a matter of safety. His responsibilities to himself, the ship and its crew made him aware of the necessity for perfection in his work. That training has stayed with him for a lifetime; a life ultimately given for more than five decades to the production of modernist fine art - all with deep bows to the styles and manners of the old masters, and a few modern ones as well.G. Linister Smith passed away on August 12, 2018 in his Kansas City, Missouri studio.