JOURNEYS: Paintings by Rebecca Crowell

Rebecca Crowell

Journeys

8 FEBRUARY - 11 MARCH, 2019

690 Miami Circle NE #905, Atlanta, GA 30324 · www.thomasdeansfineart.com

This catalog was produced in conjunction with:

Rebecca Crowell: Journeys 8 Februrary -11 March, 2019 Thomas Deans Fine Art 690 Miami Circle NE #905 Atlanta, GA 30324 tel. (404) 814-1811 www.thomasdeansfineart.com Images Š Rebecca Crowell Compilation Š2019 Thomas Deans Fine Art Catalog design: John Goodrich

This page: Where the Light Comes In (detail) oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

Front cover: Steady On (detail) oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

Rebecca Crowell

Journeys

8 FEBRUARY - 11 MARCH, 2019

Undersong oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

I paint in response to ancient and rugged places that I love, interpreting them intuitively

and abstractly through memory and emotion. The bogs and coast of County Mayo, Ireland and the canyons of northern New Mexico are two significant places for me, but I’m drawn to any landscape that is wild, rocky, and remote.

Certain human environments also move me: the ruins of stone buildings, old Spanish houses with hidden courtyards, megalithic monuments. These ancient places seem to me both deeply familiar and yet unknowable and mysterious. When I paint, I want to express something of this strange duality—a feeling of nostalgia for something not yet experienced.

Contrasting qualities also contribute to the deep and complex whole of a place. These include stillness and movement, strength and fragility, aging and timelessness, vastness and intimacy. In my work I look for ways to express these dualities—strong value contrasts, variations in the texture and amount of detail, hard and soft edges.

My overall process expresses another duality: a sense of history and the present existing simultaneously. This happens as I build layers of paint and cold wax medium, then scrape and dissolve away selected areas to reveal what is underneath, creating complex surfaces.

As I finish a piece, I ask myself if what I’ve painted feels like a place to me. Not a place in the sense of a particular location, but more like an essence or fragment of something more universal. If not, I keep working. What I’m after is elusive, but somehow the journey takes me there.

—Rebecca Crowell, 2019

Rebecca Crowell’s work is slow work that is the end result of many processes—

including looking, seeing and feeling—all spread out over time. “Many ideas and images pass through my mind as I paint,” Crowell observes: “The passage of time and aging, the accumulation of experience, the symbolic and visual aspects of natural processes including stratification, collapse, compression: the ephemeral marks that people leave behind.”

Crowell’s works are abstracted from nature: they are personal responses to the visual forms, colors and atmospheres that have surrounded her in a variety of locations.

There are vestiges of representation in Rebecca Crowell’s work, but it is a type of representation that has been refined and re-constituted through her artistic sensibility and through her emotions.

Like other artists who have both abstracted the landscape and used it to feed their souls—including Richard Diebenkorn and Agnes Martin—Crowell is extremely sensitive to the nuances of time and place. She is the same person wherever she goes, but her work changes when she travels to Sweden or Ireland. During a residency in Ricklundgarden, Sweden, Crowell drank in the textures and colors of ice and snow, rocks, lichen, and birch bark. In Ireland she studied crags, bogs, rocks and ocean spray and let them come through her into a series of richly evocative semi-abstract fields of color. Crowell’s “Atmospheric” series features veils and tones that evoke specific places seen through the tendency of memory to obscure specific forms.

Rebecca Crowell’s work challenges us to travel with her and to share her sense­-​ memories. She invites us to stand with her and take in the world and its transcendent beauties slowly. As an artist she does the hard work of finding the essences that surround us so that we can stand in front of them, transfixed.

—John Seed, 2014

Reprinted with author’s permission

Secluded #2 oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

Above: Landform #7 oil and cold wax on panel, 12 x 12 in.

Right: Secluded #1 oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

Above: Longing oil and cold wax on panel, 42 x 42 in.

Left: Steady On oil and cold wax on panel, 14 x 11 in.

Layers Deep oil and cold wax on panel, 36 x 28 in.

Then and Now oil and cold wax on panel, 42 x 32 in.

Above: Homeward oil and cold wax on panel, 30 x 30 in.

Right: Dwelling oil and cold wax on panel, 48 x 36 in.

Walking the Edge oil and cold wax on panel, 48 x 36 in.

In Shadow and LIght oil and cold wax on panel, 42 x 32 in.

Since earning her MFA in painting from Arizona State University in 1985, Rebecca Crowell has led a life focused on painting. When she is not traveling for teaching or for artist residencies (in such places as Ireland, Spain, Italy, and New Zealand) she works almost daily in her studio in rural Wisconsin or in her winter studio in New Mexico.

She draws significant influence from these residencies, as well as from her surroundings at home.

In 2015 Rebecca Crowell and fellow artist Jerry McLaughlin founded Squeegee Press to bring the use of cold wax medium to a wider audience through books, videos, workshops, tools, and artist mentoring. Their book, Cold Wax Medium: Techniques, Concepts & Conversations (2017), now in its second printing, is the first and only comprehensive guide for artists and collectors about this exciting medium. The book has been the recipient of the 2018 Independent Publisher Gold Medal and was named a finalist in the International Book Awards.

Rebecca Crowell is known for her innovative painting techniques involving cold wax medium and is represented by a number of fine art galleries in various locations including Dublin, Ireland; Chicago, Illinois; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Telluride, Colorado; and Atlanta, Georgia. Her work is included in hundreds of private, public, and corporate collections.

Opposite: Quiet Light oil and cold wax on panel, 30 x 22 in.

Back cover: What is Hidden (detail) oil and cold wax on panel, 48 x 36 in.

690 Miami Circle NE #905 Atlanta, GA 30324 tel. (404) 814-1811

www.thomasdeansfineart.com