PETERCROWPAINTER
2017-2018
NEW WORK
In the middle of September, 2017, I got back home to Detroit after spending a month or so on the east coast. Among the many things I'd been to and seen was the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where there's a room of Ellsworth Kelly's work from the 50s, a room of some well-known Jasper Johns sculptures and not so well-known small paintings, and the rooms devoted to Marcel Duchamp. For a long time or at least since I'd made it, I'd been thinking about a piece from 2014, that was made of discarded scrap paper. These scraps were what remained of what I considered to be failed pieces, or pieces I'd just grown tired of looking at. I tore up the pieces, using scissors to cut up the thicker parts, and threw everything in a garbage bag and tossed it into a corner of the studio. I may even have succeeded in forgetting about the scrap bag. Then, early in 2014, I remembered the scrap bag when I moved my studio back to my mother's house. She'd just turned 90 and needed someone there to help with the basic tasks of living. In the basement, in the same space that my dad had worked in during the last years of his life, I made the first piece in the Oak Avenue series.
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New Work
2017 - 2018
I've been thinking about how to answer the question, Why have you created this new work and what is its history? It has something to do with memory and freedom. At this point in my career, I can see that a lot of effort has preceded this work. This page shows some of it, 9 pieces stretching back to last fall, when the first piece shown here in the upper left, was made. This new work is about tackling those notions one learns while young that, if given half a chance, one would discard or modify with new evidence. One of my basic assumptions has been that an artist should never repeat herself. In order to begin this body of new work, it was necessary to question that assumption. In order to approach the idea of repetition as directly as possible, I set out to remake the same thing, and do it more than once. I seem to have hit a nerve, and the best way to go about it was to repeat and repeat that thing which one, or so I'd always believed, wasn't supposed to do. In this I had the encouragement of an artist I've always admired, Edgar Degas, who said, If it's worth doing once, it's worth doing a hundred times. Also, I was making and remaking forms and shapes that I've always liked, arcing and curved lines, circles or half-circles, rectangles, squares, plumb lines, and overlapping and intersecting edges where one form meets another somewhat off-kilter. I've always been attracted to bright, saturated color, and transparency, where brushstrokes are left on the surface and not covered up.
2018
MORE NEW WORK
The brown fox jumped over the fence. The brown fox jumped over the fence. Now is the time for all good persons to come to the aid of their country and vote! The lean brown fox jumped over the fence. In the middle of September, 2017, I got back home to Detroit after spending a month or so on the east coast. Among the many things I'd been to and seen was the Phi
#13 Oak AvenueGouache, acrylic, charcoal, cut and torn pasted paper mounted on paper 41 x 27" 2017 | #14 Oak AvenueGouache, acrylic, charcoal, cut and torn pasted paper mounted on paper 43 x 27" 2018 | #15 Oak AvenueGouache, acrylic, charcoal, cut and torn paper mounted on paper 36 x 21" 2018 |
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#16 Oak Avenue Gouache, acrylic, cut and torn paper mounted on paper 23 x 18_ 2018.jpg | #17 Oak AvenueGouache, acrylic, cut and torn pasted paper mounted on paper 22 x 21" 2018 | #18 Oak AvenueGouache, acrylic, cut and torn pasted paper 31 x 24" 2018 |
Number 1 March 2014.jpg |
New Work
2017 - 2018
I've been thinking about how to answer the question, Why have you created this new work and what is its history? It haassumptions has been that an artist should never repeat herself. In order to begin this body of new work, it was necessary to question that assumption. In order to approach the idea of repetition as directly as possible, I set out to remake the same thing, and do it more than once. I seem to have hit a nerve, and the best way to go about it was to repeat and repeat that thing which one, or so I'd always believed, wasn't supposed to do. In this I had the encouragement of an artist I've always admired, Edgar Degas, who said, If it's worth doing once, it's worth doing a hundred times. Also, I was making and remaking forms and shapes that I've always liked, arcing and curved lines, circles or half-circles, rectangles, squares, plumb lines, and overlapping and intersecting edges where one form meets another somewhat off-kilter. I've always been attracted to bright, saturated color, and transparency, where brushstrokes are left on the surface and not covered up.