Blue Song
By Ford Crull
Located in Brooklyn, NY
“It is terrifying to paint. When you start out, you are faced with this great unknown. And you think, am I ever going to paint again? Yet, as you work, it starts to formulate itself. Ultimately every work really just decides itself. I love to paint. I love the smell of paint (oil) and the way it does different things depending on how you apply it. I love how if you use a lot of turpentine, it forms these rivulets like streams in the desert. Acrylics just can’t match the intensity or viscosity of oils. In early days, I painted landscapes and portraits, but I tried to infuse them with my own nomenclature. The colors, brushstrokes, and marks that I put on a canvas transfigure into a profound sensibility that I cannot deal with in any other way. And color is a way of expressing my emotions, and the way it is planted in my works helps tell the story. When I was a boy I drew incessantly. I had sheets of paper roughly 10 by 15 inches, and I covered them with Civil War soldiers. Literally hundreds of them, each drawn with the same delicacy as if they were alive. Later I advanced to WW2, with German soldiers attacking the well-meaning but hapless British, grey against ochre, tanks and explosions, and beautiful landscapes where it happened. As I became older, I wondered what it was that had so intrigued me with these war scenarios. I became fascinated with the symbols, icons and pictograms that were behind these historic conflicts. They had a substance and meaning for me that far outweighed their prescribed meaning. A cross meant Christianity, but in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, there was a distinction between the Teutonic knights with their iron helmets invading the Russian orthodox warriors to the east. A cross could mean many things, we bow down before a cross, but are repulsed by a swastika. Yet they are related. If you cut the corners of a circle with a cross bisecting it, an early Christian icon...
2010s Neo-Expressionist Abstract Paintings
Canvas, Oil
