Graham Crowley: I Paint Shadows
Phil Porter
ENTERING THIS EXHIBITION has an initially unexpected effect, because our vision is instantly drawn to the background of all the paintings – we are plunged into that depth of cadmium lemon, which immediately forms a strange and arresting continuity that runs throughout the paintings, all at once. This sudden and unexpected connection is one from which we extricate ourselves slowly as we begin to discern images of workshops, rooms, enclosures, landscapes; and that ground gives them substance. It also gives our perception a continuity and flow as we move from each painting to the next.
This ground then already forms the basis and is fundamental in
of our experience of the paintings, which are mostly of interior spaces, and have a further unexpected aspect of being a motif that is somewhat disorganised, unruly, or disordered. Mainly workspaces and interiors that are somewhat cluttered, where the position of objects tools etc and is haphazard, subject to a certain randomness.
Yet the artist takes these disjointed spaces and finds in them a strange kind of cohesion. So many disparate elements come together to form movements or processions through each painting, becoming unexpected journeys that we follow through the pictorial space. Their ad hoc arrangements therefore feel temporary: they are here as such for now but could change at any moment into a different combination, and this gives them a kind of urgency, in parallel with the way they are painted. A feeling of inexorable change which brings a vitality to the work.
The technique in these works has transformed solidity and rigidity into energy and movement, and this is no mean feat. It also means that there is (paradoxically) a much more precise relation between all the elements, as in the seminal (or even symphonic – because of so many notes, passages and punctuations that also contribute to the whole) Light Industry, where now everything, every relation is visible, there is no hiding behind solidity and its concealment, the concealment of mass and its inertia. And this is because the ground makes visible all those relations and connections, the very coming into being of the image, illuminating those fast decisions made by painting Paynes Gray pigment directly into the medium, wet into
wet; but also, by paint being wiped away, drawn back into. Further still some brushstrokes also take away paint but leave a mark of their incisive action like a burr… a kind of viscous abutment to the oncoming brush marks.
The overall effect of this technique is that instead of structure being static, instead of form being rigid, we find a material fluidity of cohesion that is of the highest stakes in these paintings. Instead of fixity, with its often-deadening immobility, we have the movement of inexorable and expansive change.
This transformation through fluidity becomes a dynamic movement that belongs to the whole pictorial space, with form and structure now almost like the painter’s equivalent of musical notes (note here especially in relation to the tools/objects along the benches again in Light Industry, where they are indicated by drawing/wiping back into the wet paint) Indicating their physicality through shadow, rather than describing it, maintains an energy and vitality. And if this requires at times a certain speed in the execution of these works, it is one that feels necessary, because it is as though Crowley is catching the motif unawares or by surprise (or indeed, catching himself unawares in its realisation) his vision suddenly in the grip of an unexpected confluence in the motif, a fleeting unity in which everything, every mark and gesture combines in this momentary coherence that fills and encompasses the whole pictorial space.
In terms of such confluences, the artists use of duotone as a selfimposed limitation is one which becomes revelatory in engaging with the dynamic of these spaces, the way cohesion and coherence occurs within them. It cuts through what could otherwise be a
dull inanimate solidity, as in depiction or illustration. It is therefore
his way of dealing with solidity, with mass, with the seemingly impenetrable, which ultimately is to say how they come together
– in this instant (and this is provisional pending further change, a
new coherence). The ground of cadmium lemon returns through
the Paynes Gray and becomes a way of going back through mass or solidity as a barrier, of finding an articulacy within form.
This articulacy is achieved through shadow, through which Crowley paints that which indicates form, without immobilising delineation
or definition. Instead forms emerge, fade, cajole, oscillating within infinitely varying degrees of insistence, within the restless dynamic that belongs to a ceaseless vision which never settles (or if it does then only briefly) which could be said to be also the subject of the exhibition.
And if these paintings are unsettled (not to be confused with ‘unfinished’) it is surely because an elemental property of shadows is time, which is to say change. And whilst change is that we literally cannot be conscious of, in painting at least, and in this exhibition, we have a visceral connection with its deft work. As continual change and fluency in these images, shadow has a strange mercurial quality, its restless movement, coalescences, and at times volatility within these spaces, rooms, landscapes.
And the ground illuminates the restlessness of shadow, with its efforts to indicates shape, form. If form occurs with more clarity
within shadows translucence and movement, it does so sometimes
as a flicker, a glimmer, but at other times as a punctuation, a
dramatic flash like the shelving unit and stool in Light Industry, and strikingly the pillars and window in Workshop Hastings. An effect
that comes from deep within the painting, coming as it does from
the very ground of the image.
A dramatic turn of another order is when those punctuations or forms disappear – dissolve back into the ground by and through which they appear. The ladder in Dark Arc 11, mostly held in shadow but where at the uppermost part of the painting it dissolves back into the ground, back into that which gave it that distinct quality
and form: a return to the origin, to the interior of the painting. This work powerfully demonstrates the remarkable distance achieved from the oscillation between just two colours, and the infinite
depth and space between. This becomes the space of painting, the painter’s dream, its deepest and almost impossible space, but one that we also inhabit in this exhibition, nonetheless.
But the ground, its light, can also appear as that to which all
proceeds, as in Light Fiction 2. In this work the ground gives rise to
the clamouring, jostling of forms that join in a procession towards
it on either side, as to the distance, which is the opening out onto
space beyond, leaving us a path to follow to the furthest distance.
And following paths and movements through the fluidity of shadow
is a major aspect in experiencing this exhibition; and of different
kinds – such as sudden incursion of light, which is also a dramatic revelation of the ground amongst shadow, as occurs in Spare
Room 2. In the landscape piece Kerry Moon, shadow becomes the sweeping confluence of building, land and sky, and the fleeting
unity they are part of. Here the technique reveals many different
densities and distances, degrees of revelation of the ground,
through which we enter this painting.
Room 601 for example, also has very different paths and passages of shadow, which now are concerned with the dynamic of a more ostensibly ordered space. But even here, the structure comes together without the abrupt stops and harsh angles which would belong to an illustrative or diagrammatic depiction. Instead, the vertical and horizontal brushstrokes are of such subtlety that they meet each other in a coherence that augments the whole space –
it is expansive instead of contained or contracted. This is a crucial aspect of Crowley’s technique here: the brush marks, gestures,
his manipulation of the medium in general serve to expand the physical/material properties of the subject, because rather than blocking out form and structure, solidifying it, his brush marks and varied other gestures serve that expansion, and again this is no mean feat. The pictorial space is therefore never quite ‘finished’, because through the technique it doesn’t stop, but carries on. Never a cohesion or settling of things that is accomplished, but one that begins over again, an unceasing event.
And ultimately this is surely one of the most captivating aspects of this exhibition: that of a continually active dimension to his subject, which carries on and over into our own experience of the work.
It is by going through solidity and form in these paintings, that
our perception of the physical environment can be transformed.
This exhibition is a profound reminder that what we perceive and experience in the material world, is subject to a continually new coherence.