Each painting is a journey, built in layers- full of contradictions, mistakes, clean slates, experiments, memories, scars, truths, pain, stories, ideas, and need.
Born and raised in and around New York, Beverly Crilly currently lives in Brooklyn and Telluride. The artist thanks her numerous teachers including Rebecca Crowell and Robert Weatherford at the Ah Haa School for the Arts, Telluride, Colorado. She has also taken classes at SVA, Pratt Institute, and the New York Academy of Art.
Artist Statement
These paintings were all created in oil, pigment and wax. Each work is a journey, built in layers- full of contradictions, mistakes, clean slates, experiments, memories, scars, truths, pain, stories, ideas, and need.
The work begins with viscous, sticky oil paint smeared, dragged, pushed or scraped across the hard blank wooden surface. They create wonderfully saturated color fields and bold lines. These are the groundwork, the 'I statements’- deeply held beliefs, subconscious, and guttural utterances of beginning. Sometimes these grounding marks are literal phrases: gratitude, radical empathy, place of joy, acceptance, love, sanctuary. Others are pure movement, symbol, direction or shape.
These raw emotional statements leave the board open and vulnerable- revealing essence and truth. The journey always begins and is informed with these marks. These beginnings are covered and built upon layer by layer- obscuring, supplementing, and transforming these initial gestures.
The textured layers are created by mixing pigments- oil paints, pastels, and charcoals into cold wax which adds transparency and dimension and allows a more translucent color to be spread with a spatula or brayer across the surface.
Layers of thoughtful and intuitive mark making, sharp contrasts, textures, and masks add depth and meaning to these pieces, just as conversation, exploration, interactions, relationships, struggle and growth add dimension to people.
I can take a pencil or pastel bar and draw directly onto the surface- rewriting the story or merely amending details- sometimes the pencil gouges the surface, scarring it to reveal color from layers below and sometimes it just marks the surface.
All of the pieces are marked with memory and story. I brayer textured papers, plastics, leaves, string to imprint patterns and texture into each piece,- all sorts of ephemera captured and transformed (ing).
Work is revealed through areas with layers scraped away, like intimacy and vulnerability in relationships.
Time and experience leads to grit and interest. I fold in dirt, sand, charcoal, graphite, pastel and even glitter for texture and depth. The struggle and the work.
Once these layers are built up I am able transform surfaces in surprisingly fluid ways— by pouring solvents to dissolve multiple/varying layers- leaving windows, glimpses of what was vs. what remains.
I began creating art after my kids were born. I saw stories everywhere and longed to interact with them. This medium is perfect. It allows me to incorporate found objects, fragments, disparate thoughts, and tangents, as well as intuitively and intentionally developing composition and color.