Drawing

Drawing is a practice in its own right, distinct from painting, an engagement between touch and the process of continually working until the drawing emerges. Always I use memory rather than direct observation, and just a pencil and eraser. I am interested in forgotten things, fragments of images from dreams, the passage of time.

From a review of Archives Fugitives, an exhibition at Galerie Hus, Paris, with Bertrand Henry, in 2012:

“In Fugitive Archives, drawing becomes a way of exploring how things come to be both stripped (dépouillés) and intensified by memory. As in Seurat’s sketches in conte-crayon, one glimpses not things but their incidental profiles and spectral contours. But perhaps more like Bonnard, who had insisted on painting from memory, Alan Smith depicts objects as carriers of what has yet to become significant for remembrance.”

Professor Joyce Cheng, University of Oregon