Alison Yip's métier includes drawing and painting from life, as well as from her own photographs. She makes drawings in hotel lobbies, dentist's offices, malls, parks, and other public realms where there are chairs or benches to sit on and watch other people behaving. Yip's technique is constantly evolving, exploring the field between careful Realism and swiftly executed caricature. Her practise refers to Baudelaire's call for a 'painting of modern life', David Hockney's deft, economical portraits, Ben Shahn's tributes to everyday life as history, and Garry Winogrand's street photos of human 'animals'. Yip's drawings have the veracity to experience, and yield the typological knowledge, that we have gotten used to receiving from photographs. We look and realize that this is a real person that the artist saw in the world and we think: "I have also seen that type of person, with that type of hair, that nose, that attitude, and those shoes". A recent series of photos, drawings, and paintings made at Coney Island are typical in their balancing of interest in the existential, personal being of the bathers, with an anthropological or sociological descriptive attention to their gestures, dress, and belongings. Alison has sought to build her practise on her own appreciation and reassessment of tradition; her pictures are sophisticated but speak a common language.

Yip will mount her debut solo exhibition at the Monte Clark Gallery in Vancouver in September 2007.