Roger Crawford

Born Melbourne, Australia

Lives & Works Sydney (Eora)

Roger Crawford is a contemporary of Roy Jackson, John Peart and David Aspden and exhibited at Watters Gallery from 1986 - 2016. He studied at Sydney College of the Arts and the National Art School. On leaving NAS in 1973 Roger Crawford banded together with Tess Horwitz, Paul Saint and Narelle Jubelin to launch Firstdraft. One of the first artist run spaces in Sydney, Firstdraft is still esteemed as an important venue for the investigation of contemporary conceptual ideas in current art practice. Crawford is highly respected amongst his peers and hugely popular in his teaching role at the National Art School (1986 – 2023).

In his series, Scrim, which was many years in the making, Crawford created meditative and calm works with a great sensitivity to material and scale. These all over painted fields are visually captivating and rewarding. Roger Crawford is a painter’s painter and investigates ideas in depth and over much considered time. 

The works are endless, you can’t see where they have started or where they finish and as such there is constant enquiry. The edges of the work are slightly softer and quieter, framing the whole; this technique gently keeps the eye within the work. Even when the eye settles and focuses the paintings continue to slowly move. On first observation the pattern leads the eye across the work although deeper investigation reveals considered well-placed brush strokes masterfully leading the eye. The uniformity of ‘pattern’ is replaced by intricate mark making to extend what the artist calls ‘the valency of looking’.

These ambitious and extraordinary large paintings silently command the space in which they are placed and are ideally suited to corporate collections, public/private institutions and large residential spaces. 

“In the textures and tonality of these paintings an allusion might be found to our physical environment: could we be looking at dappled rock faces or a forest-floor mosaic of leaf and bark? Or do explanations like these merely circumvent our meditation on the painting’s presence? “Resemblant” is a word that Crawford favours, but unlike artists who name a subject to explain their intentions he leaves interpretation to the viewer, with the one proviso that they take their time.”

 Joe Frost, Artist/Writer