Ford Crull: The Figurative Work 1974-2018
Solo show May 11- June 3
Conversation with Carter Ratcliff and Ford Crull: Sunday, June 3 at 4pm
Known as an abstract painter with a neo-symbolist sensibility, Ford Crull’s work has often had
an element of figuration, both inadvertent or deliberate. Either way, each idiom references the
underlying notion of ambiguity. As hallmark of the 19th century symbolists, ambiguity was prized by the poets and artists of this movement: the writers Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud
and painters such as Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, and Odilin Redon. Anything that may have been intentional in the artists narrative had no more
validity than what the viewer may have envisioned in the presented image. For the Symbolists, figuration was still the dominant visual element, but with a convoluted and unexpected truth.
Crull has often said that even when working in an abstract form, he often sees images and or
faces in the work which are then expanded into the final work. This condition is referred to as
pareidolia. It is endemic to the human perception. This corresponds well to Crull’s notion of
ambiguity in his work. The essential images in Ford Crull’s work reveal his expression of life in art, and
can be either abstract or figurative Paintings such as “Thougtful Angel, and ‘Inquisitor” reflect this
idea of Symbolist ambiguous sensibility.
In a wider sense, these figurative works constitute a kind of intensive search to wrest meaning
from an anarchy of feeling. As meditations on emotional chaos, they enter into a world of
competing impulses and simultaneous transmissions, seeking a resolution that is both cathartic
and mysterious.
About Carter Ratcliff:
Carter Ratcliff’s books of poetry include Fever Coast, Give Me Tomorrow, and Arrivederci, Modernismo. He published his first novel, Tequila Mockingbird, in 2015. Mr. Ratcliff received the Project for Innovative Poetry’s Gertrude Stein Awardin 2005 and the first Annual T-Space Poetry Award in 2013. An art critic as well as a poet, he has published his art writing in many journals, including Art in America, Artforum, Modern Painting, Tate, Art Presse, and Artstudio. Among his books on art are The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art and The Reinvention of Art: 1965-1975. Writing of the interaction between Ratcliff’s poetry and his art criticism, Terance Diggory observes in The Encyclopdia of New York School Poetsthat his “language is activated by the act of poetic imagination, an act as essential to engagement with a work of art as with the ordinary world. In turn, the worlds he has encountered in art inform his poetry.” Ratcliff has taught at New York University; Hunter College, New York; and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting & Sculpture. In 1969 he received a Poets Foundation grant. His other awards include an Art Critics grant, NEA, 1972 and 1976; a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1976; and the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism, College Art Association, 1987.
About Ford Crull:
Ford Crull was raised in Seattle, where he graduated from the University of Washington. His work
is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Dayton Art Institute,
and the Brooklyn Museum. His paintings were included in the important 1989 Moscow exhibition,
“Painting After the Death of Painting,” curated by Donald Kuspit. Exhibitions have included shows
in London, Milan, Italy, Sun Valley and Seattle. His most recent work has involved
art experiences, some of which are painting with a live music element, and most recently
executed blindfolded also with musical accompaniment.
