Keith Crown

Columbia , Missouri

Watercolor

One of California's leading landscape artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Keith Crown studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1936 to 1940 (B.F.A.) Shortly thereafter he joined the US Army as a field artist in the war in the Pacific against Japan. At the war's end he completed his studies in Chicago and moved to Southern California . Crown assumed the post of Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of Southern California , Los Angeles , from 1946 to 1983. He was also a member of the board of directors of the California Water Color Society and served as President in 1959.

Upon his retirement (1983) Keith Crown moved to Columbia Missouri . He spent most of his summers in Talpa , New Mexico (near Taos ), where he built a home and studio. Today the art of Keith Crown is included in the following collections; the University of Southern California Fisher Gallery , Los Angeles , the Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Missouri , the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. , and the Albuquerque Museum, New Mexico. Primarily a painter and watercolorist, Crown was one of the first California artists to explore abstract elements within landscape compositions.

Notes from the Artist

Subject matter is a prime motivator and synthesizer of forces in my painting. I have painted huge city airports, a sink full of dishes, the rooftops of London , the mesas of New Mexico , the fields of the middle-west. I rarely paint in the confines of a studio, preferring to be in the presence of my subject material. I try to have a fresh or radical idea about each subject. Strong painters create new formal means out of the necessity to communicate their subjects. This has never been for me a superficial effort at a sort of photographic realism. Like the American landscape painters John Marin and Charles Burchfield I try to make visible the invisible elements of nature: various wind, moisture, temperature, odors and sounds that are specific to a particular place at a particular time. Principal influences in my development were Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh, and Henri Matisse. I also admire the works of Milton Avery, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and the American landscape painters John Marin and Charles Burchfield.