Alan Crockett’s Paintings

I make abstract paintings that generate “abstract experience”: a real and unique experience that is known, that is meant but is, in the end, ineffable.  My work explores the zany spirit and pallet of newspaper “funnies” as well as the challenges of abstract painting.  They lead me on a journey that allows for the discovery of the narrative possibilities of mark making.  Funnies and abstraction are reconciled to create new relations between gesture and image, illusion and abstraction.  They are playful, colorful, full of psychic spills, halts, breaks and image scuffles resulting in a constant exchange and circulation of elements, none of which is absolutely definable.  I bring the work to a state of “pre-figuration”: perhaps a place that allows for memory or sensation without being specific memory or sensation.

The paintings proceed by shifting between accidental incident and deliberate delineation.  Lines dance, pierce, trace and interrupt, inviting play and exploration while revealing the process of the painting’s making and forming a symbiotic relationship between drawing and painting.  The colors, marks, shapes, erasures that ensue mark time, map or excavate space; they record and reflect the body’s presence/absence as tracings of what has been made, unmade and remade.

These paintings are unabashedly pleasure giving in sensibility.  They express the joy of painting, the sensuousness of paint, color and line; its capacity to engage all our senses; its tendency to allow for nuance, contemplation and play.