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| Graham Crowley |
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THE window of the long-established draper's shop, trading under the name of Crowley, is stuffed with cushions and curtain material. Contemporary display methods have passed it by and, by the look of it, not much stock has shifted since stripes were last fashionable in the mid-sixties. Crowley's is a quintessential Crowley. It's a sort of sampler, a scene with more aspects and complexities than may first appear. Where an Edward Hopper shopfront soaks in the atmosphere, this one has a picturebook quality. Illustrating what? An address seen from across the street, personalised but remote, Crowley's could be a formalist's version of an estate agent's artless snapshot; it could even be a remake of an extract from Ed Ruscha's 1966 photo-concertina Every Building on Sunset Strip: West Coast ribbon development transposed to small-town Ireland and worked over in classic Dulux, orange, white and green. Flagging the Irish colours is a hint, certainly, but one of little or no significance. Similarly, having the shop called Crowley's enabled Crowley to sign the picture without providing and actual signature. The full title - Crowley's (Killorglin) - places it in County Kerry, Between Dingle Bay and Macgillycuddy's Reeks. Background information, not needed really; yet it's good to know, surely, that through the door, dimmed in grey shadow, the shop has contents, layer upon layer, accumulated over decades. The subject may be familiar, but the treatment and the way they're made: it's to touch this nerve, Crowley said to me, years ago, when he was preoccupied with painting dismal spots in the forest of Dean, waterlogged tracks begging fingertip investigation by the Gwent police. Why oh why do I persist in painting shit so lovingly?, he asked himself. Rhetorical questions are key to Crowley. They demand responses, like a mirror demands images. What needs to be put in? What needs to be painted out? Once grounds are established (monochrome as a rule, these days, giving way occasionally to light haze) ideas get going. How a painting is done determines, of course, what it becomes. The incidents that serve to make space and create interest are superimposed and absorbed as the picture develops. The aim is to accommodate the rhetoric: to be convincing. Wherever I've lived, I've always tried to paint living there. Over the past twenty years, the Crowley's have moved from a small converted shop in East Dulwich, to a grand house in Cardiff, overlooking a park, to an isolated smallholding in the Forest of Dean and then back to South London, to a villa in Forrest Hill, a pre-war time capsule. Recently - too recently for comfort, or for paintings to have been prompted by it - they have taken on a derelict workshop beside a railway line in Deptford. For some years now there has also been a cottage at Rineen near Castletownsend in West Cork, between Toe Head (great name) and Cape Clear. The places that constitute Crowleyworld tend to straggle. One location relates to another and everywhere there are unkempt trees or steaming sink estates. Crowley's roots (born in Romford, largely Irish ancestry) extend throughout, as do his mannerisms. In the mid-seventies at the Royal College (where four years ago he became Professor of Painting) he produced formulaic abstracts, a bit Picabia (c.1913) a bit Leger. Animated scenes followed involving wildly foreshortened domestic implements, culminating in Reflections, 1984, a diptych featuring a hammer and a power drill banged up inside a room overlooking a hubbub of chimneypots and TV aerials, thick as pretzels. In that pre-computer game era, the violence was strictly operatic. I'm not one of those existentialists with a chainsaw, Crowley remarked at the time. I'm more a model railway enthusiast. He has always liked detailed pretence and contained terrain: worlds within worlds, realms of hobbyists. His romanticism sparked the desire to contrive radiant illusion (Oh to be Rubens…), best achieved, he decided, as Rubens and other masters of the Baroque had done, by formulating each picture in white impasto then, with care and relish, bringing out details and spaces in translucent glazes. Crowley loves to see distances emerge and to find a sense of place surfacing unexpectedly. Here he is not so much the fellow traveller of the model railway enthusiast as the resourceful animator with a widening repertoire of specialist ways of doing things: sgraffito fencing, blotted trees. (One in the eye for the de-skilling process.) Indeed, the mannerisms of his glazed impasto phase are clearly reminiscent of Disney's Pinocchio, and the recent paintings evoke, unconsciously perhaps, the styling devised for 101 Dalmatians in the late Fifties by Ken Anderson and Walt Peregoy: scratchy black lines, both static and animated, superimposed on sheets of flat colour. It's not that one expects a hundred plus spotted dogs to stream along the pavement in Crowley's (Killorglin); the painting is too complete in itself, for that. But here and elsewhere, notably in Blue Street and Local Colour (3), the incidents are couched on colour so adroitly that they virtually give us the time of day. Sky and ground are one, saturated Cadmium Red or Cadmium Yellow, strong enough to do away with foreground distractions and cloud effects. These paintings are well organised, beautifully settled. The preternatural clarity of some - houses planted like targets seen through high resolution nightsights - even affects the atmosphere of others such as One Day and Green Day, pictures in which, from Cork to Donegal, mists arise and, once again, intricately worked impasto maps the landscape. Here is the Ireland of scattered cabins or bungalows, brightly painted to stand out where, in the past, buildings were apt to shrink in grey dilapidation. The numbers of lilac houses in the Skibbereen area is phenomenal, Crowley observes. When he paints a landscape, usually prompted by photographs, he likes to start in the middle and work outwards, improvising as he goes, extending field patterns to the edges, bracken for darker patches, telegraph poles for scale and verticality. And thank God for fence posts. In the old urban settings dishevelled roofs closed in on back yards and turmoil prevailed. Now the worry is agoraphobia. Crowley's Irish topography swerves from exactitude, nonetheless it is remarkably accurate in tone and disposition. Not just the treelessness of Donegal, which is obvious, but the sense of distances doubling back on themselves and cultivation running to seed in a mild climate. Confident now that he has a working knowledge of these surroundings, he has dropped some of his more interfering devices, notably the white dots that - in the guise of butterflies or thistledown - dotted a number of earlier views. Belatedly I've come to economy or efficiency, he explains, but it is more than that. Of all the genres, landscape is the one most readily rendered trite. Crowley's awareness of this has often provoked him into playing on the notion of landscape painting as vile green plant reprocessing. In Irish landscape, however, he finds freshness. In Yellow Bay, for example, a prospect of Union Hall, over the hill from Rineen, he comes slap up against a picture postcard view and places the houses lined up along the harbour and their reflections in the still water (a tone darker), in a painting that may defer distantly to Magritte but aligns with the American Luminists, with Stuart Davis, in his Gloucester Massachusetts period, and Fairfield Porter. Paintings such as this are lucidly succinct. Thirty miles from Killorglin, on Valentia Island at the mouth of Dingle bay, two petrol pumps guard a possibly abandoned filling station. Red day (Valentia) is another of Crowley's deft sightings, a place towards the end of the road at the uttermost limits of the land, this side of America. The painting almost qualifies as a sign; certainly it stands as testimony to the fact, according to Crowley, that there are no dead end roads in Ireland. To the pumps and back: same old journey but different every time. In painting, of course, at least half of the art lies in knowing, as Crowley says, when to say when. Copyright William Feaver 2002 |
1950 Born, Romford Essex
ONE MAN EXHIBITIONS 1982 Air Gallery, London SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 1976, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 93
John Moores, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Imperial War Museum BIBLIOGRAPHY 1982 Hayward Annual, British
Drawing 1983 Artscribe No.40 Graham Crowley
by Robert Ayers 1984 Playing Live, (catalogue)
Robert Ayers 1985 Still Life: A New Life,
(catalogue) Vivienne Bennet 1987 In Living Memory, (catalogue)
William Feaver 1988 Cries and Whispers, (catalogue)
British Council, Lewis Biggs & Teresa Gleadowe 1989 The New Romantics, Art &
Design, January 1989 1991 Somewhere Else, (catalogue) Edward Totah Gallery 1993 Riverscape, (catalogue) Deanna Petherbridge 1996 Marking Presence, (catalogue)
Artsway, Hampshire 1999 The Flower Show, Group Show,
Harwood House (catalogue) 2000 Contemporary Landscapes,
CVA magazine, article by Keith Patrick 2001 Familiar Ground, (catalogue)
Beaux Arts, text by Andrew Lambirth 2002 Are you serious? (catalogue) text by Andrew Lambirth 2003 Beaux Arts (catalogue) text by William Feaver
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