Don Crow

Reynolds Gallery is showing 17 smallish works by Don Crow until December 23rd. I was hoping I would have been able to get my hands on a digital camera by now and taken some photos to post, but that hasn't happened yet and Reynolds Gallery has no website - I'm sorry I have no images to share.

Paint and paper collaged constructions with no distinction made between support and surface, all 17 pieces are suspended by silver wire, hung from a nail about a foot over each painting. At first glance the hanging seems careless and ugly, but as one circles the room glints of reflected light within the paintings catch the eye. These sparkles of light are caused by the staples which hold each piece together, relating to the wire and helping to justify the hanging. You will certainly not leave this show wondering how anything was done, but you might be impressed by how sophisticated crude can be.

Crow seems to be using brown Kraft Paper to make all of these, and I say there is no distinction between support and surface because the same layers of Kraft Paper forming the ground are then folded over themselves all along the edges - creating "frames" for each piece - with additional layers of cut Kraft Paper shapes added. Some of these initial frame/grounds are left brown, with others painted either a solid color or two-toned, the frame sometimes differentiated by being painted a separate color.

One of the pieces - with waves of pink paper overlapping a green sphere - references a mountainous landscape, the rest are all abstract. Painted circles, squares, triangles, ovals, and rectangles are attached with staples, arranged in a careful row or layered. It looks like he paints a sheet of paper with a big brush before cutting out individual shapes, probably spending a lot of time arranging different colors and shapes before settling on a composition and stapling it together. Brushstrokes are easy to read, truncated by the act of scissors cutting shapes, and Kraft Paper brown is legible through the sometimes thinly applied colors.

"What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject-matter...like a comforting influence, a mental balm-something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue." - Matisse