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As he says 'I cannot cope with likeness', which is why he doesn't paint portraits. 'With landscape you cannot put the tree in the wrong place.' This implies that all Crowley's landscapes are to some extent reinvented, or at the very least reinterpreted.

Graham Crowley practices a form of landscape painting which is all about the energies of colour and the valencies of surface and impasto. His principal subject is Rineen, on the west coast of Ireland, which encompasses field and forest, hill and lane, valley, estuary and scattered dwellings. Crowley spends a good portion of the year there, and observes it in many moods. Yet although Rineen is the pretext for these paintings, their subject is just as much the history of painting and a contemporary painter's relationship with it. In one very important respect, Crowley's paintings are meditations on what it is to be a painter at the beginning of the 21st century.

Andrew Lambirth | 2000