Allan Forrest Small

BIOGRAPHY.     Award-winning artist Allan Forrest Small started painting as soon as he was old enough to hold a brush and was initially self-taught as an artist.  After receiving his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he studied painting, drawing and lithography in Washington, D.C. with instructors from Georgetown University, George Washington University and the Union Printmakers’ Atelier, and life drawing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  He has painted in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., as well as widely throughout New England and France.
Small’s paintings have been exhibited at the Collector Gallery in Washington, Thomas Moser galleries in Alexandria, Virginia and Portland, Maine, the Prints and the Potter Gallery in Worcester, MA, the Rye (NY) Arts Center, the Lyme (CT) Art Association, the Academic Artists Association, The Aurora Gallery and the Sprinkler Factory Gallery, Worcester, MA, the Spaulding Aldrich Gallery, Whitinsville, MA, and the Fitchburg Art Museum.  He is a sustaining associate member of the American Watercolor Society, the National Watercolor Society, the New England Watercolor Society, Pennsylvania Watercolor Society, and the Transparent Watercolor Society of America. He is an elected Artist member of the North Shore Art Association, the Academic Artists Association, and the Rockport Art Association, and a regular exhibitor at the the Lyme Art Association.

Small’s original paintings can also be seen at the Prints and the Potter Gallery, as well as on line at AllanSmallArt.com.

Artist’s Statement.     Art is language.  Most landscape artists feel driven to paint because we want other people to realize not only what we see, but what we sense and feel when looking at our world.  It is this need to share one’s emotional response to landscape that drives us to paint again and again.  Anyone who can snap a photo, or who’s trained in the skill of drawing, can capture the look of a place.  Artists, especially plein air painters, are driven by the need to distill the atmosphere and mood of a place – and a moment in time – and to share it with others.  I hope that my paintings evoke the spirit, the smell, the feel of the places I have painted – whether because I have found them uplifting, enchanting, bittersweet or – sometimes – haunting.