6
Soul Gatherer
The trick, as audience, is to lay oneself wide open before the work. The art of
Richard C. Smith reveals itself most powerfully when preconceptions are left
at the door. Intuition and emotion are the necessary critical tools, rather than
book learning and measuring. The drawings reproduced here are gatherings
of souls, embodied as paper, graphite and wax. For the artist is a kind of
medium and magus, receiving images in his imagination, like visitors appear-
ing unexpectedly at the doorstep, and transforming their spectral forms
through hand and eye into tangible things. “Its a dreamlike thing when I do the
drawings,” he says, “they just sort of appear.” There is no shortage of subject
matter: “There are so many figures and faces. They come all the time. I have
to push some back. I disregard some of them, you know. They come back at
other times and I sometimes use them then. I call them souls because I don’t
know what else to call them, really.”
‘Untitled’ 2011. Pencil & crayon on card, 6.25 x 7.75 ins.

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