This week I got more into my painting. I basically finished the background, as it is just black with a slight red circle  in the middle. I realized how wacky/bended the knife was, so I got a ruler out to straighten it and change the shape a bit so that it didn't look so weird. I also finished the bottom hand i think. I am very happy with how it has turned out. I think the colors look cool and the blending is oK(it could be better, but I ran out of some of the midtones towards the end and I am too lazy to make some more right now. I am excited to start working on the hand and finish the piece. I love the direction it is headed

Ghost, 2018, oil paint on stretched canvas, 800mm x400mm

Born Shaun Friend, Craww is a british artist whose work deals with "the beauty to be found in contradictions and ambiguity - life and death, beauty and decay, strength, fragility, the interplay between conflicting and complementing forces of nature." He started his career path as a passionate graphic designer in advertising agencies, but in his mid forties he shifted his focus onto art,  developing the alias Craww, and became an amazing artist. For the Past decade, Craww has had a successful art career. He has had many shows all over the world, including a solo show at the Nero Gallery in Rome called "Ebb and Flow" in March 2017, and two solo shows at Haven Gallery in New York the first called “Swords” in December 2018 and the second called "Woven" in January 2021, and countless other group and joint shows.

Sacred Practices, 2018, graphite pencil on Fabriano paper, 760mm x 560mm

Trinity, 2017, graphite pencil on Fabriano paper, 560mm x 400mm

I really love Craww's paintings. The emotion and the whole vibe of the pieces are amazing. I love his craftsmanship and brushwork, especially in the way he paints skin. I love the subtle hint of mystery and creepiness in his paintings. I am really drawn to his compositions, like those of the long, skinny paintings he makes and the drawings and paintings so packed to the brim with detail that you don't know where to look.​

​His conglomeration is so thoughtful and after following him on Instagram for a few months, where I initially encountered his work, I have begun to understand his process of creation and planning better. He constantly doodles and is out biking and hiking in nature, which is primarily where he seems to draw his ideas from, whether the nature is incorporated in the landscape backgrounds or flowers, or animals scattered across his paintings. I love how he approaches his background, giving them enough variety between pieces, but still maintaining a general cohesiveness. In his more plain backgrounds, he achieves interest by having highlights of warmer, lighter color around or near the heads of his subjects. His paintings really inspired me for my at-home painting and my most recent in-class painting. His incorporation of disembodied body parts in his paintings like Navigator, No Quarter, and Communion(all shown in this post) was a real driver in experimenting with elements of that within my own work. Furthermore, he is really skilled in his fade to black mechanisms(i didn't really include his paintings that do this other than No Quarter) which is nice for me to look into, especially when he posts short painting clips on instagram, as I am working on my tenebrism, which involves a lot of fade to black in my work.

I think No Quarter is one of my favorite paintings of his, even though it is so different from most of his other and more recent work. The simplicity, the drama, the coloring, the lace, the red string!! I love all of it so much. I also love really love the general coloring that he uses in his paintings that seems to have a generally universal vibe even though the color palettes can be so different. I think this is because of his blue-black underpaintings that he does to work out the correct values and shapes before he goes in with the actual color. 

He starts his paintings by sketching out a few possible ideas in his sketchbook, playing with composition subject elements, then he sketches his final idea onto his canvas, using a grid technique to ensure his proportions are what he had initially planned. He then goes in with the color in glazes and other applications. Sometimes, if he is unhappy with the way a painting turned out, or thinks that it could have gone in a different better direction, he will repaint it. He paints each section part by part, so focusing on finishing, or almost finishing a helmet at one time and then moving on to say the flowers, or the figure or whatever, but he paints in chunks, rather than attacks the painting as a whole. I might have to try out the concept of underpaintings now, because of how much I love his artwork, I would probably do red because I love red and how it brings warmth to the painting.
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I also had a really hard time choosing the paintings of his I wanted to include in this post because I love so much of his artwork, so just know that he has countless other paintings and drawings that are equally as stunning as these! 

I could not find any credit info for this one as I think he reworked it many times and has no intention of selling it.

Familiar ghosts, 2020, oil on stretched canvas, 700mm x 700mm

Interview with Craww:
beautifulbizarre.net/2016/02/16/interview-oc-vs-craww-a-special-edition-of-open-call/
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Podcast Episode ft Craww called "Love is Like Pork":
www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTmOwutM_60
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​His Haven Gallery show "Woven":
www.havenartgallery.com/portfolio/craww-woven/

Website: www.craww.com/
* not recently updated and doesn't have all of his work

Shop: craww.bigcartel.com/
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Instagram: www.instagram.com/craww/
    Instagram is probably the best place to see all of his work as well as his process, inducing wips and doodles

Facebook: www.facebook.com/Craww.Art/

Communion, 2020, oil on stretched canvas, 40cm x 20cm

Realm, 2020, oil on stretched canvas, 40cm x 20cm

A wood block print i found online that illustrates some examples of japanese aesthetics as well as architecture

Example of Wabi-Sabi

On March 11th, 2021 , MLWGS hosted a lecture by Amanda Dalla VIlla Adams over Zoom discussing Japanese Aesthetics. I think I had gone to a similar lecture in 2018 or 2017. I can't really remember, but I was excited to watch it because from what I remembered of Japanese Aesthetics from previous knowledge and discussions of it over the years, it is a pretty interesting topic that I could stand to learn a lot more about.

​I was especially interested in the concepts surrounding western beauty, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, where he attempts to quantity beauty in an objective sense, and how it contrasts from Japanese Aesthetics. Kant basically came to the conclusion that in order to find something beautiful, we can't have any use for it. If we are using it for something, it clouds are true view of it, warping its beauty by its use. I think it is a bit more complex than that as you can really have a use for everything. If you own something, then you have a use for it, regardless of how irrelevant or inconsequential. For example, owning artwork; its use is to look pretty. By that logic it cannot be beautiful, nothing really can be beautiful as everything has a use. Furthermore, Kant's claims would qualify no person as beautiful, which I disagree with. Japanese Aesthetics, in turn, was founded on the ideas circulating the Han Court(794-1185), or what is considered the height of all Japanese Aesthetics. The Tale of Genji gives us the three pillars of Japanese aesthetics: wabi, transient and stark beauty, sabi, the beauty of natural patina and aging, and yūgen, profound grace and subtlety. These pillars describe beauty in a much more natural and simplistic way, releasing it from the human consumption, comprising Western Aesthetics as defined by Kant.

I find that I am plagued by the constructs of the Western idea of beauty because I want to make beautiful things. We once had a discussion about this last year and the fine line between beauty and ugliness, or really the lack of the line in some instances, and this lecture really brought that into my mind to ponder about, and perhaps take some risks and maybe incorporate more ugliness into my work. I also was reminded about the fixing bowls with gold and I really want to do something with that in the future because I love that concept.