After years of living in urban places like Seattle, New York, and metro Detroit, where I grew up and went to high school, I moved to a very small town, population about 1,300, on the eastern shore of Maryland.
All 3 places presented unique challenges to an artist trying to survive let alone create. Having to leave the city, I needed to find a place where I could work, attach a studio to my living space, and be able to afford living there. Leaving Detroit wasn’t easy, but I found a place with a large garage and adjoining house that presented possibilites for renovation.
I grew up in a family involved in art. My father taught art at a university in Detroit, and also at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. He was an accomplished draughtsman filling many workbooks with drawings. My mother was a public school teacher. She, too, was interested in art, she’d met my father at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. My brother, sister and I were introduced to the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Cranbrook Art Museum, where we were exposed to the history of art and modernism in America.
A graduate of the University of Michigan with a BFA, cum laude, I have an MFA from Indiana University.
In 1984, I moved with my then wife to New York City, finding a small ground floor apartment in South Brooklyn. Shortly afterwords, we moved to a larger apartment a few blocks away to President Street, near the Gowanus Canal. The apartment had a small parlor which was made into a studio.
Trying to figure out how to paint without large canvas strtechers, I hit upon the idea of gessoing paper and painting on it with oil paint. These were exhibited in a show called “Recent Work,” at the New Waterfront Museum on Front Street in Brooklyn, April, 1989. In a review of the show, Steven Bernstein, writing in the Brooklyn Phoenix, said of my work, “His highly erratic forms and shapes, small, frenzied, reminded me of effortlessly floating paramecium.”
Later, after I had moved back to my hometown, I participated in a number of local, statewide and regional exhibitions. At the same time, I was fortunate to get hired to teach art in the Detroit Public Schools.
In 2010, I saw the Mark Bradford exhibit at the Wexner Center at Ohio State University and got the idea to mount paper onto cotton duck canvas. One of these pieces, Crow Barn 17, gouache,cut and pasted paper, 58″ x 46″, 2010, was exhibited in the Michigan Annual XXXVII, Anton Art Center, Mt. Clemens, MI, 2011.
Two years later, my painting, “Three and Four: Red, Yellow & Black,” was nominated for a first prize in painting at Art Prize, Cathedral Square, GrandRapids, MI. Of this work, Mark Stryker, Detroit Free Press art critic said, “There is something of Stuart Davis’ jazzy rhythmic pop in the progression of color and shape across the canvas and something of Brice Marden’s swirling loops that meander leisurely within the painting.
But Crow’s own voice and the love of pure painting shines.”
I have been in a number of University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design alumni shows, including in 2015 where my piece, “Untitled #2, Red,” received one of the Best of Show awards.
My statement said, “This is a drawing about making and feelings.The process of making is labor intensive, involving all of my physical attributes, especially my arms and legs. The drawing is also autobiographical…a reworking of the past, bringing the past into the present. It’s also about the power of the artist to say something personal.”
I created this website to both share and to promote my work.
While it’s true that I am an artist living in a small town, I’m not that remote from what’s going on in the big city. I’ve lived for many years in the big city, and have shown my work there. In order to continue to create on the scale that fills my needs, I searched for a place that would have the room to do that, while making it possible to live there on the kind of income that an artist has.
This website serves the purpose of furthering my work, putting a name to work that might otherwise be seen as anonymous, and by taking what’s made in the privacy of the studio and completing the creative process by sharing it with an audience.
Peter Crow - Artist 