b'Soul GathererUntitled 2011. Pencil & crayon on card, 6.25 x 7.75 ins.The trick, as audience, is to lay oneself wide open before the work. The art ofRichard C. Smith reveals itself most powerfully when preconceptions are leftat the door. Intuition and emotion are the necessary critical tools, rather thanbook learning and measuring. The drawings reproduced here are gatheringsof souls, embodied as paper, graphite and wax. For the artist is a kind ofmedium and magus, receiving images in his imagination, like visitors appear-ing unexpectedly at the doorstep, and transforming their spectral formsthrough hand and eye into tangible things. Its a dreamlike thing when I do thedrawings, he says, they just sort of appear. There is no shortage of subjectmatter: There are so many figures and faces. They come all the time. I haveto push some back. I disregard some of them, you know. They come back atother times and I sometimes use them then. I call them souls because I dontknow what else to call them, really.6'