About David Crouch
DAVID CROUCH
My most recent series of works are characterised in moments of feeling and experience, of contact with place or people. These are mainly oil on canvas, around 1metre square, also some watercolour, charcoal and crayon in combination, also with oil, The feeling is important, rather than any ‘objective’ characterisation of typicality. Bodily features and the materiality and felt juxtaposition of space sometimes merge in the process of painting; abstracting from rather than abstract.
The image ‘Walk’ was a pivotal point in moving towards further abstraction.
Into this work capturing of momentary feeling, response and expression I develop the inflections of memory into the felt moments of the act of painting, or drawing, with different materials. Colour is sometimes the strongest movement, at other times becomes more elusive. Earlier work can be raided for prompts, those prompts worked on towards often very different ideas. Painting and drawing with different materials can be a moment of becoming, signified in the tension and feeling on the edges of shapes and feelings
In recent years I found that my emerging forms sometimes become more reduced; simpler shapes of lines, wavering blocks, gentle agitation and part-suggesting smears of colour; loose ovals and irregular sensuous forms became part-suggestion and part-holding back, part pushing further.
please contact me at d.c.crouch@derby.ac.uk
Recent Exhibitions
Upcoming: Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire, July 2012
Mixed Show, Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donnington April 2012
Mixed Show, ‘Beyond the Horizon’, Richard Attenborough Centre Gallery, Leicester 2011.
Mixed Show, ‘travel and movement’, Angel Row Gallery 2010
Solo Show, The Old George, Newnham onSevernMarch-April 2009
Guest Artist Southwell Artists Open Studios. 2008
David is a Professor of Cultural Geography and has written on the practice and work of a number of artists. His most recent book of essays, Flirting with Space: journeys and creativity, Ashgate 2010, includes discussion of the expressive encounter artists make with the worlds around them, and a chapter on the art of Peter Lanyon. His most recent research, including a critical reflection on ideas of abstraction, the practice and work of Roger Hilton and on his own work and practice will be published in the international journal Cultural Geographies in 2013.