a Few of My Favourite Things 11/1/2009

Rosson Crow
Five Minutes Late and Two Bucks Short at the Cha Cha

Sorry for the recent absence of posting updates to my a Few of My Favourite Things Column here but I'm making it up to you with a really great contemporary artist. Her name is Rosson Crow and she recently graduated from Yale's MFA program. Her work to me is a perfect synthesis of old and new, modern and classical and at the same time very contemporary. Her work involves very elaborately staged, beautifully painted scenes of decadence. You can smell the decay in these paintings and makes your skin crawl in the best way. She has painting everything from the interiors of strip clubs to slaughter house with equal eye for detail. I often describe her work as the love child of Pollock and Bacon but in all honesty, the connections go much deeper than that. Their is something deeply Baroque about her work. It conjures up memories of everyone from Caravaggio to Goya to Velasquez. Despite the absence of figures from her work their presence is nonetheless always felt. You feel the people who populate these places and it haunts you. She is a real talent and she has a long, prolific career ahead of her.