Ted Smith

alt=Ted Smith, an elderly white man in glasses, sits on an office chair in front of an easel with a landscape of rocks and trees on it. He is surrounded by paint brushes. James Edward "Ted" Smith (1933–2016) was a painter from Kamloops, B.C., Canada. He was known for his abstract landscape paintings of the region.

Early life and education Smith was born in Vernon, B.C. to Alma Louisa Smith (née Johnson) and James Alexander Smith. He grew up in Lumby, Barriere, and then Kamloops, B.C. He decided to begin art school on the advice of William Geddes, an industrial psychologist at Victoria College. During his time at VSA, he studied sculpture, design, drawing, and painting with teachers including Orville Fischer, Jack Shadbolt, Donald Jarvis, Roy Kiyooka, Peter Aspell, Fred Amess, and Reg Holmes. and the Art Ark gallery in Kelowna. After the Art Ark closed, Ted's work was promoted locally by the Kamloops community. Ann Kipling, Toni Onley, and Jack Shadbolt, among others. His paintings were known for the use of colours and shapes, and for their association with lyrical abstraction and modernism. He painted from both field sketches and photographs, and described his process as “trying to capture what [he] saw.”

Exhibitions 1980 – Ted Smith and Rhona Armes, Kamloops Art Gallery 2011 – Familiar Territory, Kamloops Art Gallery 2022 – Reading the Land: Ten Years of Collecting, Kamloops Art Gallery (posthumous)