Gregory Crane: Watercolors and Works on Paper
“Gregory Crane: Watercolors and Works on Paper” is a survey of drawings, paintings and prints from Mr. Crane’s long and distinguished career as an artist and educator. Constructions, either man-made or natural, are this artist’s obsession. Out-buildings, garden walls, distant houses, growing plants, trees and undergrowth become articulate meditations on growth and form. Gregory Crane is a master of classical visual arts techniques: india ink, conte crayon, charcoal, watercolor and traditional printing on paper. With these age-old materials, Crane clarifies the gradual process of art-making that study the unity of natural space. This exhibit of small watercolors and works on paper is being shown for the first time as they served as the artist’s private studies for finished oil paintings. Ranging from older sketches to newer works on paper, Gregory Crane dissects his process not just from within his creative vision but throughout the decades-long practice of realizing that vision. According to Crane: “drawing is the heart and soul, the anatomy of what might become a painting”.
Gregory Crane’s solo show “Watercolors and Works on Paper”opens July 30th and continues through August 21st, 2016.
About Gregory Crane:
Gregory Crane’s work can be found in many important museum and public collections including the M. I. T. List Visual Art Center, Museum of the City of New York and the Orlando Museum as well as numerous international and national corporate and private collections. Mr. Crane teaches at the School of Visual Arts and lives and works in New York City and Redhook,NY. More information about Gregory Crane can be found at:
Artist’s website: http://bit.ly/gregorycraneart
Essays about the Artist:
Gregory Crane: The Four Seasons by April Gornick: http://bit.ly/ccagcag
Gregory Crane interviewed by Simon Lane for Bomb Magazine: http://bit.ly/ccagcsl
Artist’s Statement
One of the most important elements in making a painting is orchestrating the parts toward a greater effect. To quote Max Beckman, “You can only understand or get to the invisible by a thorough study of the visible.”
The process of turning an observation into a painting begins to get more and more abstract as I translate what I see onto canvas. This translation, or distillation, is the “basic anatomy” of a painting. I’m attracted to nature more for what I imagine it to be.
I’m trying to get to an essential reality, an archetype. The painting will start to suggest certain things to me; there is always a building process that consists, in part, of my “notes”, which have become a visual shorthand that I “read” carefully. The slightest gesture of nuance of a stroke will help me to proceed. The unreal elements become real through the painting. And that involves much more than mood, it involves an essential light, form, color… I often use parts of the landscape as an index, you could almost refer to it as a a “catalogue of events.” It doesn’t have to be a particular place, or a particular time. Nature can spawn an image that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
Metaphor becomes the driving force behind the painting, making it more vivid, more alive. I want the painting to be more than just what it looks like. The abstract process of putting what I have seen onto the surface of a painting is the very thing that becomes most real to me. It is a form of “realism” that is based on, or relies on, the abstract.
