The next Artist You Need To Know is Alice Crawley (1915 – 2011).
Crawley was a painter, sculptor and designer of stage sets as well as a founding member of Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines.
Stephen Remus, Director at NAC, offered the following about Crawley’s ideas and aesthetic : “Alice epitomizes the intuitive artist. Her motivations are inscrutable, mysterious and she carries no maps or accompanying analytic tableaux to decipher the curious objects that are her creative legacy.”
Crawley was born in Peterborough, ON, in 1915. She worked a librarian while also taking art classes : Crawley also designed and created the first stage sets for the Shaw Festival at this time. Crawley took painting classes at Ridley College in St. Catharines with previously featured Artist You Need To Know David Partridge.
Her breakthrough occurred when a work submitted to a juried art show was praised and recognized by A. Y. Jackson, and this led to her exhibiting her artworks around Canada, at galleries in Montreal, Winnipeg, London, Hamilton and Niagara. At this time, the opportunities for emerging artists was more limited than today in the Canadian art scene, but Crawley earned a spot in many group exhibitions around the country, among such notable peers as Alex Colville, Tom Hodgson, Ivan Eyre, Mary Prittie and André Biéler.
“As a gifted painter, Crawley worked within the conventional genres of Canadian art. She carefully modelled the subject matter with a muted palette. She broke down forms into simplified abstractions, such as in the work of Marian Scott and [previously featured Artist You Need To Know] Paraskeva Clark.” (Rhona Wegner, past Director at Grimsby Public Art Gallery)
Crawley was also very focused upon community : in 1970 she became the editor of the Twelve Mile Creek magazine which featured artists in terms of both visual and literary spheres. This allowed Crawley to not only platform artists in Niagara but also to feature female artists and creators. Crawley stated that “[The Twelve Mile Creek] allow[s] me to marry all my loves at once and bring them together under one roof – art, the written word, photography, humour, poetry and theatre.”
Crawley would leave painting behind in the 1980s and began to focus more on sculpture (this was in part to studying under An Whitlock at the Dundas Valley School of Art in Hamilton). Her aesthetic incorporated both found objects as well as metal work, in terms of more experimental installations that reflected her ideas and concerns regarding ecological issues (animals – especially birds – were a recurring theme).
Major retrospectives of Crawley’s artworks was mounted at the Grimbsy Public Art Gallery in 2006 (titled Sixty Years of Artmaking) and the previous year a major overview of her artworks was on view at Niagara Artists Centre, Rodman Hall Art Centre and the Durham Art Gallery. A publication was produced collaboratively by these organizations (and can be found at the St. Catharines Public Library). Another major exhibition of Crawley’s work took place at RHAC in 1992, titled Pastorale.
Crawley was recognized with the Trillium Arts Awards Mayor’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007.
Alice Crawley passed away in St. Catharines, ON, in 2011.
To cite curator Rhona Wenger again : “An undeniable force in the Niagara arts community, Alice Crawley’s work defies attempts to define and categorize. Crawley has created a series of powerfully stated ideas about, and interactions with, the world around her. Her strength of purpose and power of expression earned her the respect and admiration first of the Niagara arts community centred in St. Catharines, and eventually of a broader community, but (as those of us ‘in the know’ always say about the uninitiated) never the general level of respect that her undeniable talent deserved.’
Many of Crawley’s artworks can be found in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Gallery of Canada, the University of British Columbia and the Vancouver Art Gallery.