The artist’s association with this gallery started in the early eighties when we invited him in to our workshop to create etchings and monotypes. This monotype connection has remained strong and fresh, and since that time both I and Brian Pilliod, who first conceived of a Crane drawing exhibition and designed the catalog for the show, have had the great pleasure of collaborating with the artist on a large series of painted monotypes. Paintings and monotypes will also be included in the exhibition to give the viewer not already familiar with Crane’s art a rounded image of his body of work.

Gregory Crane is known as an artists’ artist, his intense and intensely personal paintings of landscape; rural, farm, industrial decay and urban garden, use color and form, light and dark to create a world that is akin to magic realism. They come equipped with slightly menacing plant life, visual air trails, hidden and beloved wild life; birds, cats and dogs and living skies and moving grounds. These drawings then are the working bones of his paintings. One can follow the artist’s visual thought process as he works through the drawings.

Trevor Winkfield writes in his catalog essay, Town and Country: "… Crane himself has stated, ‘drawing is the heart and soul, the anatomy of what might become a painting.’

Crane corrals a rich array of marks (usually in black chalk or sepia, in conté crayon, ink or pencil)…tender tappings, strokes, wisps and surreptitious erasures are cross-bred with various scourings, jabs and skimmings to weave what amount to that curious hybrid, elegiac expressionism... Like seashells held to the ear, such drawings deceive and convince at the same time…"

Trevor Winkfield, was born in England, his artwork is represented by Tibor de Nagy and he has published numerous books.

Simon Lane, who interviewed Crane in 1994 for Bomb Magazine, writes of the question of style in regard to Crane’s working method: "Gregory Crane is in the habit of being discovered. While the burdensome rock of fashion will always roll back to the foot of the mountain so that Sisyphus has to start all over again, Mr. Crane simply continues to do what he has always done, executing his work with the extraordinary skill and consistency of purpose, free of the constraints suggested by a capricious age…

Indifferent to the cyclical torture of fashion and critical whimsy, Crane adheres to the methodology - observation, draughtsmanship - of one driven to recreate his surroundings rather than litter them with bits and bobs that constitute subject matter in what is called the art world…"

Simon Lane, who was born in England, divides his time between Paris and Rio de Janeiro. He is the author of three novels: Fear, Still Life With Books and Le Veilleur.

Energy is another critical element in the work of Greg Crane, Carl Little, who has reviewed Crane for Art in America, writes in his catalog essay Gregory Crane’s Energy Fields: "In the beginning, there are dark allées, disconcerting penumbra and a branching thistle. A country estate has gone to seed; the gardener is hyper and distracted the orchardist, a madman and visionary. Here, a tree is a fantastic sanguine candelabrum, and a sunflower to which Redon would have tipped his hat, doubles as Cyclops. Elsewhere, a figure with a large club stands guard at a gate and zephyrs agitate the skies.

These drawings are the marvelous foundation for Gregory Crane’s spirited sensibility...These fields of energy are carried forth into those landscapes that have been captivating us for decades."

Carl Little is the author of Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.

Mr. Crane has exhibited his paintings with the Ed Thorpe Gallery, Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts and Hirschl & Adler Galleries, as well as participating in solo university exhibitions and numerous fine group shows.