From the catalogue for the 2005 Radius exhibition, curated by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Arts and the Ridgefield Artists Guild:

Allyson Smith’s paintings, while based in representation, are arenas for the artist tovigorously explore gestural abstraction. In the artist’s recent series of self-portraits, Smith uses our familiarity with the human face to explore how an image can be loosely constructed out of discrete brush marks, emphasizing the poetic and metaphysical over the purely optical. Smith’s paintings embody the struggle of trying to depict not just the objective physical world, but also the moment-by-moment living and breathing human element. —Richard Klein