McKenzie Smith has been fascinated by Japanese philosophy and painting since his student days in Paris in the late 1950s, when he was exposed to works of such artists as Kenzo Okada. Torii (the Japanese word for a gateway to a Shinto temple) is one of a series of works he produced after visits to Japan in his role as Director of Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums. The series shows his commitment to a personal brand of landscape-based abstraction that has roots partly in the work of the American colour-field painters of the 1950s and partly in Eastern traditions and is marked by an Oriental sense of balance and calligraphic finesse. 

Ian McKenzie Smith OBE PRSA PPRSW, born 1955

Montrose-born McKenzie Smith studied at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen and Hospitalfield in Arbroath. He has been in the mainstream of the modern Scottish abstract-art movement as both a painter and an administrator and is a tireless supporter of the arts in Scotland.