FORD CRULL
Artist statement
There is a strong element of the diaristic in Crull’s work, with each painting serving as a kind of painterly journal of reflections and reveries, set loose from their origins in specific events. In a wider sense, these paintings 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.
Crull’s written words act as a kind of voice which emerges from and disappears back into the highly worked surface. The scrawled, fragmentary phrases serve as kind of conscious counterpoint to the free flowing of gestural abstraction and symbolic forms. Color is the silent partner to language, infusing the welter of images with an enveloping emotional atmosphere, ranging from hot reds and golds to cool shimmering light blues and whites.