Bob Crewe
Untitled introduction
Catalog essay, Jan Baum Gallery, Los Angeles
1999

Bob Crewe brings a restless, driving energy to all of his creative work. It has been more than a decade now since the epiphany he celebrates as "8.8.88", the day it was revealed to him in "an awakening, a galactic coloration, an aurora borealis" that he should finally turn that energy from an enormously successful career as a song writer into the as yet only sporadically tested field of art. As if to make up for lost time, the years since that decision have been characterized by giant steps of change and growth.

Let's be clear from the outset that Crewe's calling to make paintings did not arrive out of a vacuum. An art student in New York in the early 1950s before he turned professionally to popular music, he was aware of what was happening around him in the vigorous cultural context of that thriving cosmopolitan city. His earliest works were lively, eminently competent examples of that post-surrealist mode of visual expression, widely practiced in the preceding decade, which combined a strong bent toward abstraction with the linear whimsy of a Paul Klee and the quasi-figurative imagery of an Arshile Gorky. Marked by its cultivation of creative spontaneity to tap into the realm of the archetypal subconscious, this form of visual exploration was favored by many of the leading American artists of the time, and led directly to the great experiment of Abstract Expressionism.

But Crewe rejected the path of pure abstraction. During a year of travel in Europe in the late 1950s, he discovered the allure of incorporating materials and objects as media for "painting", and came up with a series of works which were exhibited at the Bodely Gallery in New York in 1960 under the friendly sponsorship of Andy Warhol. Cast more in the European tradition of the aesthetic assemblage of "found objects" than their ironic cultural celebration in American Pop, these early works impress the viewer with the raw, elemental energy they seek to harness, by their lyrical interplay of symbolic values, and by their powerful admixture of playful spontaneity with forceful formal articulation.

In any other circumstance, a successful first solo exhibition of this kind would have marked the beginning of an artist's lifelong career, with all its promises and pitfalls. For Crewe, whose "day job" amply satisfied career needs-and also demanded time-the path toward the fulfillment of his visual creative urge was destined to be less traditional. Returning as a passionate visitor to art in the decades that followed his first show, his production was characterized more by energetic fits and starts than by steady change and growth.

Even so, surprisingly perhaps, the vision he projected did remain remarkably consistent: detached from the expectations and contingencies that the "art world" can impose on those seeking the stamp of approval of galleries, collectors, and museums, he left himself free to cater to no one but himself. His issues have therefore never been those promoted by the intellectual trend of the current decade, but rather deeply personal, immediate, and pressing. Each time he was called back into the studio-as he was for example for a brief period in the early 1970s-it was with the same bold, uninhibited vigor, the same plunge into the sensual materiality of surface, the same fascination with the relationship between image and ground, as well as with the power of image to reverberate at the subliminal level with rich, even primitive associations.

For a full decade now he has been concentrating on his visual work with single-minded attention, and his current work is usefully seen in that perspective. In the period that led to his epiphany, he now recalls, he had been merely "showing up for the music business, marking time." At the same time, he had been looking at art again. "There was a big exhibition of contemporary Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum," he says, "and it made me ache. It was so organic, hitting every nerve. I was anxious to get doing things again." At first, by his own admission, he was "all over the place", testing out a wide range of options from powerful, sometimes aggressive large-scale assemblage works to minimalist grid paintings in colorful monochromes. Installed in an exhibition space in Palm Springs in 1992, he says, his renewed production "looked like two or three different artists on the walls."

Determined next to clarify his focus, he plunged into a prolific year of production in 1993, and the results were shown in Los Angeles at Earl McGrath Gallery in 1994. While building on his interest in construction and assemblage, these works were largely successful in resolving the aesthetic indecisiveness of earlier work into a consistent vision that still allowed for variation. A series of paintings which shared the title Texturology, for example, explored the possibilities of a muted, reductive palette in rhythmic, textured surfaces, some arranged in grids, and treated with salts and acids to create the hard, almost archeological effect of entropic weathering. An overall bluish or grisaille tonality seemed to underscore the reductive intent, directing the viewer's attention not to the easy appeal of color but instead to the more stringent qualities of surface and structure. Their rhythms, along with the jazzy associations of their collective title, served to align Crewe's visual instincts with his musical sensibility.

Two key works in particular from the 1994 exhibition suggested the direction that was to lead to his current work: Bow, and My Conversation with Dubuffet. The latter's title acknowledges a kinship with the French artist Jean Dubuffet, with whose primal, "art brut" imagery and textured, heavily material surfaces Crewe was already acquainted as early as the 1950s. In both these works, the eye is clearly invited to read the roughly outlined images as figures set in dramatic counterpoint in a primitive landscape, beneath alien planetary bodies. The "conversation," clearly, is an aesthetic dialogue with an important mentor as well as an act of homage, but the implicit relationship between the mirrored figures remains enigmatic, rejecting the analysis of the interpretive mind and its desire for narrative explanations.

Crewe's next series of paintings, in 1994, seem to set aside the concern with figure in favor of a more probing exploration of surface. Using a highly malleable medium composed of an acrylic and resin compound, he coated the surface of large, square canvases with the mix and "combed" it into a symphonic expanse of sweeping parallel or crossing lines. Finished with the application of a sometimes subdued, sometimes brilliant monochrome color, these paintings resonated with the complex, feathered potency of a bird's (or an angel's?) wing, seducing the eye into a restless journey through its rhythmic passages. In another approach to surface that same year, he used folded layers of fabric or parchment paper, hardening and sanding it to create a deeply textured ground, then overpainting it and treating it with acid and salt washes to achieve the effect he was looking for. In one large triptych treated with black lacquer and salt washes, the impression is of a delicate Chinese landscape painting of endless snow-capped peaks or distant waterfalls. In another, the corrosion of acids evokes the scarred, rust-red, faulted impression of an aerial view of an arid, alien planet.

The scale of these works was in itself imposing, even epic, and Crewe's next impulse seems to have been to refine and organize his gains into a more intimate and lyrical context. He chose to work on smaller canvases, where the ground became more complex as he added multiple layers of medium, and the cross-combing became more intricate, more dense. After sanding down, the surface appeared deeply scored and rough, but the appearance was illusory: in actuality, to the touch, it was relatively smooth. Experimenting at first with grid arrangements, Crewe soon found himself "more and more involved in wanting to get underneath" the surfaces he was creating, "to figure out," he explains, "what made a shape the way it is. I started to experiment with building up and tearing down."

He began with the cross-combed layers of his own paintings. In a series he called "Inset Excavations," he tore away sections from the surface, exposing the subsurface in a central "inset" panel and darkening it to make it still more emphatic. He then reversed and reapplied the fragments in new configurations in the exposed area. This inspiration offered Crewe a double reward: not only could he pursue his fascination with uncovering what the painting process concealed from sight and thus show its "history" in the context of its final state, he had also stumbled on a way to generate the images he loved with genuine spontaneity. It was a field in which the interplay between artistic control and artistic freedom, between intention and chance could be freely investigated. With the addition of a cross-combed frame, the inset panel became a darkened stage inside a double proscenium, enabling the artist to invent dramatic scenes where sometimes whimsical, sometimes disturbing subliminal events would mysteriously unfold. Invited to enter this space, the viewer's eye picks out the forms of mythic beasts and dancing figures in dark landscapes of the mind.

Crewe's current work derives directly from these earlier investigations. The peelings that he uses to create both the image and the ground, however, are no longer taken from his own paintings. Instead they are "harvested", intriguingly, from the studio floor. It happened in part by chance: with the floor in the process of a recent renovation, Crewe became fascinated with the archeological quality of the resultant scrapings and the way in which they revealed both a surface and a subsurface history-the visible and the invisible both at once. Seizing on this opportunity to allow a still richer role to chance, he began to incorporate the scrapings in his paintings. In a transitional work, "Inset Excavation Collage" dated 12/18/99, he assembled a number of the fragments into a background for his central panel and, reversing others, hand colored them in black and muted red for contrast and put them to work as images. The picture evokes an ungainly running figure, a turtle, and an ominous black moon, along with scurrying minor figures, all participating in some obscure nocturnal ceremony that engages us with its suggestions of primitive rite.

The next step, in the series Crewe called "Karnak", was to move away from the security of the geometrical inset panel and instead to raise the image fractionally, leaving it almost indistinguishable from the background surface but for the thin black line that separates them. Less clearly differentiated, then, the images become more inscrutable, more oblique in their reference, akin to the timeless, weathered stones of the ancient Egyptian temple whose name they celebrate. At the same time, the proscenium disappears as image and ground become unified in an organic whole, with now only the cross-combed frame containing them.

Everything here is surface; and as if to test out an opposing impulse, Crewe immediately followed up with "Black Sea" and "Falcon and Peking Man," dramatic works in which the images dance around golden sun solar discs against a deep, black ground that opens up a dizzying spatial depth. Seizing the opportunity, also, to let go of yet one more element of control, he abandoned the by now familiar cross-combed frames, allowing the painting to create its own space against the white gallery wall.

Building on the insights and the confidence gained in handling this newly discovered medium, Crewe returns with a new authority to the human figure in his most recent series of paintings. In doing so, he draws at once on a whimsical, sometimes droll, even farcical sense of humor combined with his abiding attraction to the psychological and psychic reverberations of the archetype. In the large-scale "Audience", for example, he pieces together an epic scene in which the monumental, crowned figure of a monarch seated to the left impassively receives his courtiers-strange, half-human, half-birdlike creatures who flock toward him, importunate in their eagerness. In "Spirit Dance", the figure of a clown/magician/pierrot with a pointed cap is seen dancing with a burgeoning spirit presence, amorphous as a genie from a bottle, and a whimsically grotesque mirror-image projection of the self. "Nefertiti" evokes the regal pose of the great Egyptian queen in a delightful, brick-red cameo portrait set calmly in an archeological sea of floor peelings.

Surrounded now by "found" frames, treated or painted to echo the spirit of the work (Nefertiti's is gilt, ornate, and elegant,) these works form a nexus for the most compelling issues that have preoccupied Crewe, not only in the past decade but from his earliest interest is visual creation: the relationship between image and ground, between surface and depth, and between control and chance in the creative process; a dedication to the human relevance of art, and to the way it resonates in the human psyche; a vital sense of play, whether humorous or musical, and a spirit of endless investigation. Above all, they provide a field for the release of that peculiar energy that characterizes his creative drive, an energy that goes through phases of formal containment, but more often remains restless and expansive, working always for the monumental gesture, the big statement, the one that says it all.