Ford Crull

Untitled

2022

“My work can be understood through the mind, but it is best felt with the heart, experienced through the emotions, recognized as a manifestation of the spiritual that is born on the ...

“My work can be understood through the mind, but it is best felt with the heart, experienced through the emotions, recognized as a manifestation of the spiritual that is born on the ...

“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...

“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....