Art exhibition this and that at Hunt Gallery

From Jan. 13 to Feb. 21, 2020, the exhibition, this and that, new paintings by Don Crow, will be on view at Mary Baldwin University’s Hunt Gallery.

Hunt Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Don Crow. A painter and collage artist, he has been awarded numerous grants and distinctions, including the Pollak Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts as well as inclusion in the Virginia Museum exhibition Un/Common Ground. With an MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Crow has taught at VCU in Richmond and Doha, Qatar, and worked as visiting artist at Oregon College of Art and Design in Portland. Crow’s work has been exhibited at Reynolds Gallery as well as at 1708 Gallery, Plant Zero, the Rawls Museum, and with Virginia artists in the traveling exhibition Constructs. His fragile paper collages at one end of the spectrum and large digital prints and abstract paintings at the other end draw attention to objects as obvious constructions and as invisible processes. Crow’s mixed media projects have investigated photography and laser etched surfaces to explore the tensions between muteness and expressiveness as surfaces and images become subsumed by time, memory, and digital records. Recent paintings highlight mysteries and textures with ambiguous relationships between surface and ground, applied versus painted surface, and deliberate mark versus accidental crease. The surfaces and compositions translate themselves between paintings on wood, canvas, and paper.

Crow writes the following about his new work:

These paintings arise from memory. Memory can be willed or involuntary. I have seen paintings that said what I believed or felt, paintings that showed me how to see. I’ve stored or locked away details from hundreds and thousands of paintings throughout my viewings of art. A painter’s brushstroke, a light or insistent touch, has left me knowing there are expressions which cannot be named.

My paintings are memory’s response to those paintings, the barest, sparest relics of surfaces already known, expressed or felt or seen. Everything has been subtracted in order to leave behind something of the contemplative and factual essence.

A reception will be held for the artist from 4:30 to 6 p.m. on Monday, January 13, in Hunt Gallery. The public is invited to attend. Hunt Gallery is dedicated to the exhibition of contemporary work in all media by regionally and nationally recognized artists. The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday during the academic year. Hunt Gallery’s schedule for the 2019–20 academic year can be found online.