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Gordon Appelbe Smith was born in East Brighton, England on June 18, 1919. His father, William George Smith, was an amateur watercolourist who took Gordon and his brother Donald on frequent visits to the National Gallery, London and the Tate. In 1933, following his parents' separation, Smith moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba with his mother. He studied at the Winnipeg School of Art from 1937 to 1940 and enrolled in the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in 1939. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant, Platoon Commander, and Intelligence Officer with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, suffering severe injuries during the 1943 landing at Sicily.

Smith returned to Vancouver in 1944, where the Vancouver Art Gallery held a solo exhibition of work he produced overseas. He completed his art degree at the Vancouver School of Art in 1944 and taught there from 1945 to 1954. In 1951, he studied at the California School of Fine Arts with Elmer Bischoff, learning about American Abstract Expressionists. In 1956, Smith joined the University of British Columbia's Faculty of Education, where he taught for 26 years until retiring in 1982.

Smith's artistic career evolved through various styles, from early landscape work to Abstract Expressionism in the mid-1950s and later gestural abstraction. In 1955, he won first prize at the First Biennial of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada for "Structure with Red Sun." He represented Canada at the São Paulo Biennial in 1960 and collaborated with architect Arthur Erickson on projects including murals for Simon Fraser University (1965) and artwork for the Canadian Pavilion at EXPO '70 in Osaka, Japan.

Smith received numerous honors including appointment to the Order of Canada (1996), Order of British Columbia (2001), and membership in the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. In 2009, he received the Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts. A major 60-year retrospective was held at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1997. After retirement from teaching, he established the Artists for Kids Trust to benefit children's art education. Smith died on January 18, 2020, regarded as one of Canada's leading abstract artists.