Artist of the day

Monday, April 13, 2026

Artist of the Day, April 13, 2026 : Jori Smith, a Canadian painter, watercolorist (#2499)

Jori Smith was a painter, watercolorist, draughtswoman and muralist, and a central figure in the Montreal art scene of the 1930s. A founding member of the Eastern Group of Painters and Contemporary Arts Society, Smith is best known for her portraits created while living in the Charlevoix region of Quebec. With an acute, compassionate eye, she captured character and mood in portraits that are remarkable for their lack of sentimentality, as well as their spontaneous execution. Smith also created nudes, still lifes and landscapes.

Marjorie Smith was fifteen years old in 1922 when she enrolled at the Art Association of Montreal, taking classes from Randolph Hewton. When the school closed three months later, she entered the École des Beaux-Arts, and over the course of five years there, garnered numerous prizes. She attended the Monument National concurrently, and would later study with Edwin Holgate.

It was in 1930 that Smith and her husband Jean Palardy went on their first painting trip to the Charlevoix region. Over the next decade, they spent long periods in the area, renting a house for two years, boarding with various families, and eventually buying their own summer house in Petite-Rivière-Saint-François. For two summers, they traveled around the region with the ethnographer Marius Barbeau, assisting him in his study of the Charlevoix culture. Immersed in the rural community, Smith drew great inspiration from the people she came to know. At the same time, she opened her door constantly, both in the Charlevoix and in Montreal, to many artists and intellectuals, including her closest friends Jean Paul Lemieux, Marian Scott and John Lyman, as well as Goodridge Roberts and Alfred Pellan.

In 1934, Smith embarked with Palardy on the first of many trips to Europe, traveling to France, Spain and England, where she took an interest in contemporary British artists. On such trips abroad, she produced numerous landscapes in pen and ink, watercolour and oil. In 1937, she held her first solo exhibition at Toronto's Picture Loan Society; by then she was already signing her work Jori Smith. Two decades later, Smith withdrew from the exhibition scene following her separation from Palardy, and spent increasing periods of time traveling. She re-emerged in 1976 and continued to paint every day, even in her nineties.

Jori Smith was always greatly inspired by the work of Bonnard. Her earliest work, such as Nude (1937), already shows a modernist approach, with a somewhat subdued palette. Under Pellan's influence, she moved towards brighter colours, as evident in The Communicant (1944).

Smith was awarded the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts' Jessie Dow Prize (1955) and la Médaille de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec (2001). She was a member of the Order of Canada (2002).
© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Jori Smith or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only

Ms. Jori Smith Self Portrait, 1945

till Life, 1933

St. Urbain, Québec, 1935

Rose Fortin, 1935

Percé, 1935

The Little Boy Who Didn’t Like Ice Cream, 1938

Gaspé, 1944

Portrait of a young girl, 1944

Untitled (Reclining nude), 1948

Nova Scotia Harbour, 1949

Jeune fille, 1950

Still Life with Cat, 1951

Femme nue assise, 1952

La fillette en bleu, 1952

French Girl, 1955

Girl with Ribbon Bow, 1955

Nature morte, 1955

Seated Girl, 1955

Petite Rivière, P.Q., 1956

Pyrenné, 1956

Majorca, Spain, 1958

Summer Landscape, 1969

The Cat, 1971

Portrait of a Cat, 1978

Judy Chez Moi, 1981

Self-Portrait with Tulips, 1981

Flowers in a Vase, 1982

Portrait Of A Girl, 1982

Soto Portego de le Colonete, 1983

Venice, 1983

Untitled (woman in Chair), 1998

Kate in a Red Cap

Saturday, April 11, 2026

Artist of the Day, April 11, 2026 : Sun Mu, a Korean painter (#2498)

Sun Mu is a Korean painter. He worked as a propaganda artist in North Korea before fleeing to South Korea in the 1990s.

Sun Mu was born in North Korea and trained by the North Korean Army as a propaganda artist. Later he studied art in college. During a severe famine in the 1990s he fled to South Korea where he works as a painter. Out of concern for the family he left behind in North Korea he uses the pseudonym "Sun Mu" instead of his real name and does not allow photos of his face.

Sun has acquired fame and notoriety for the Socialist Realist style of his paintings, which resemble North Korean propaganda imagery and have even been mistaken for such. One of his portraits of former North Korean leader Kim Il Sung was removed from a Pusan biennale because organizers wanted to avoid problems for exhibiting "pro-communist" art.

Sun himself and art critics have noted that his images are replete with political satire; depicting, for instance, the North Korean leaders in Western clothing. His signature work is the "Happy Children" series of paintings, which show North Korean children displaying the uniform forced smile that Sun says was taught to him at school in North Korea.

He is the subject of the 2015 documentary "I am Sun Mu" directed by Adam Sjöberg.

© 2026. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Sun Mu or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only