Katie Crown

BiographyI was born in Los Angeles and grew up here. I have never considered any career other than being an artist. Some of my earliest memories are of my father, the painter Keith Crown, taking me on painting excursions with him in the Palos Verdes hills. Our painting excursions over the years were always to paint landscapes. At times, he would ask what landscape I’d enjoy painting, but we never painted figuratively.

My father influenced my artwork first. Some other artists I admired also nurtured my development as an artist. Among others, Cezanne and Marin particularly influenced my watercolors, Klee and Picasso helped me draw better, and Matisse inspired my use of color.

My parents split up in the early ‘60s, and I moved to the Washington, D. C., area. During my teen years in the East, I remained obsessed with the California ocean that I missed. I painted rural landscapes of Maryland and began keeping cartoon sketchbooks.

To start college, I returned to Los Angeles in 1969 and enrolled at the University of Southern California, where my father was one of my professors. Those were turbulent times. I transferred to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, then married young, before finishing my B.F.A. at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. At the museum school, Liz Quantock’s stained-glass classes strengthened my handling of color and geometry, Donn Moulton shared the latest gallery-scene excitement, and Barney Rubenstein encouraged me to work the humor from my drawings into my larger paintings, which were mainly non-objective at the time.

My husband and I moved around the country a lot, following his journalism jobs. I mostly painted landscapes in the Midwest and the Southwest for more than two decades, with a few forays into large figurative work based on my cartoons and a start in ceramics. When an opportunity opened for moving to Southern California in 2000 for his job, I was delighted. I returned right away to painting the ocean, exuberantly shifting from smaller watercolor paintings to big oil paintings.

My paintings during the first few years back in California were an amalgamation of landscapes and human figures. Over time, some of my work became totally figurative, which was invigorating. I have explored themes of dancers, audiences, alienation in groups, humor in social interactions, people riding escalators, and some southern California landscapes and cityscapes. In various themes and media, unifying threads in my work have been to exalt in pattern and color (the rhythm and harmony of my compositions), and to create pieces that are fun for the viewer as well as for myself.

Source:
Katie Crown (June 2023)
https://katiecrown.net

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