CROWLEY, Graham (b.1950) Untitled, Pressed Charcoal on paper

Description

Graham Crowley was born in 1950 in Romford, Essex. He studied in London at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art (RCA), with tutors including Peter de Francia and John Golding, while developing a special admiration for the celebrated French painter Fernand Leger. He taught at various art schools including Winchester School of Art, Goldsmith’s College and the RCA, and was selected for the first time for the prestigious John Moores Liverpool Exhibition in 1976 – a honour to be repeated at many points throughout his career. He was Artist-in-Residence at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University and a member of the Fine Art Faculty, British School at Rome in the 1980s; followed by other appointments including the Head of Fine Art at the City and Guilds of London Art School, then the Professorship of Painting at the Royal College of Art in the period 1998-2006. Meanwhile he began to visit, reside and work in Skibbereen in the south-west corner of the Irish Republic as well as continuing to work in and near London. Recent honours include many solo and mixed exhibitions both in the UK and abroad. He was awarded the highly prestigious John Moore’s Painting Prize, Liverpool, in 2023. Crowley’s painting and drawing style has been distinctive from the beginning of his career. An advocate of intense close-looking and with a virtuoso drawing style, Crowley has not been shy of attending to ordinary places and objects in all their functional, atmospheric and emotional complexity. In this early drawing, dated 1982, he mangles the claustrophobic proximities of hands, food items and organic growths within a compositional format that is itself highly animated and dynamic. Familiar-seeming items of everyday life circulate together, tension and vitality combined.