Abstract artist Ford Crull uses symbolism, written words, and color to emotionally charge his paintings with sensuality and emotion. View more of his amazing work by visiting his website.
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 picture plane. The ambiguity of the image is central to my expression of life in art.
The derivation of my symbols, pulled out from the oceanic flow of an unconscious, devolved dream state, reflects a necessity for metamorphosis and recombination that deprives image of any safe haven.
The paintings function like a pool of consciousness where these elements, drawn and painted with graphic directness, collect and recombine.
The result is a highly charged distillation in which emotion, sensuousness, and reflection constitute equal parts.
My symbolic vocabulary is Mayan, Egyptian, esoteric, popular, and personal. Hearts, mandalas, spirals, and cryptic letter forms are recurring motifs. Their varied presence bespeaks a desire for a language that transcends a single cultural moment, preferring instead a fusing of the present with both the exotic and timeless.
In deploying these symbols, as well as the written word, these canvases become a kind of painterly diary, the visible marks of personal experience. Focusing on love and loss, the paintings reflect the mutability of desire.
The written words, scrawled boldly or obscured by layers of paint, act like an insistent voice, repeating the title of the painting, or recording the painter’s unconscious thoughts.
They become visual echoes, as well as abstract gestures, embedded within the painting’s surface.
Painted with a gestural directness, my work celebrates color as a symbolic agent and sensuous phenomenon.
By turn translucent and glowing, dripping and fevered, color carries a mercurial dramatic charge. The viewer is left with the task of tracing the artist’s symbolic journey, of which each work reveals a part.
Strong work. The use of symbols draws me in – mysterious, provocative!