John Meredith Smith (July 24, 1933 – May 9, 2000), known professionally as John Meredith, was a Canadian abstract expressionist painter.His trademark as a painter was rich, exciting colour which he combined with loosely figurative images of vertical stripes and forms or idiosyncratic calligraphy. He often used a small coloured ink drawing divided into squares as a template from which to develop his large canvases. In 1966, he began using details from still-wet drawings he had smudged – a way of working he regarded as his invention.