City Art Gallery & Museum - Alan Smith - Ellipsis Series

CITY ART GALLERY & MUSEUM - Alan Smith: Ellipsis Series

About the Building
Activities & Events
Current Exhibitions
School & Group Visits
Past Exhibitions
Print Loan Service
How to Find Us
Opening Times


Home Page

ELLIPSIS
New Work

Alan Smith
in his studio

Alan's new paintings, the `Ellipsis Series ', testify to the continuing relevance of painting and are a discerning response to the challenge of its apparent confines. There is an immediate sense that the work is very contemporary in form and impulse, containing a quietly assertive concern with what can be eradicated from the paintings in the interests of allowing a more subliminal solution to emerge. Alan writes of his fascination for "...what is at the edge of our vision, sensed as well as seen...". Often our glimpses of understanding are experienced at the periphery of our senses and help to question and dispute initial appearances.

Alan Smith in his studio

There is a feeling that the viewer is passing through the work and that the activity contained by the painted panels is only part of the exposure, providing residual evidence for continued activity beyond the confines of the painting. The work mistrusts and questions aesthetic appearances and is cautious of involvement with notions of lyrical passages of paint, gestural marks, nuances of colour and specific narrative. Instead a process is used which Alan describes as "...cleaning, revealing, polishing, amending and re-constituting a surface." At one level these can be seen as straightforward, practical tasks which allow for recognition, response and decision -making but eliminate superficial mannerisms; at another level they act as personal, poetic metaphor. The result is that the work has been engaged to allow the relationships of colour and surface to develop and claim their own place in the paintings.

It may seem a paradox that initially the viewer could be drawn in by strength of colour and surface; but time spent with the work gradually unravels clues that this strength relates to the questions being asked and the consequences of associated decisions. The work evokes a migratory feel and a sense of the itinerant journey man leaving a significant impact and then shifting on.

Alan Smith checking his show before openning at the City Art Gallery

Work on Show

Ellipsis Series: New Work

In the studio

On show

Gallery Plan