Don Crow

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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 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 are the staples which hold each piece together.

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.
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