WDET News
- Artist Profile: Topher Crowder
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Feb 18, 2010Arts and Culture - Link to Audio
Topher Crowder\'s \"Sfinks\"Wayne State University’s Masters in Fine Art Thesis Exhibition opens this weekend and WDET’s Rob St. Mary profiles one of the artists in the show, Topher Crowder… a multimedia artist who unique work with fine detail and Plexiglas is garnering attention.
(click the audio link above to listen to the story)
I was introduced to Topher Crowder’s work at last month’s opening of the Plan B Gallery in Plymouth.
“This is a piece by Topher Crowder…”
What Plan B Gallery owner Kevin Ewing is describing is an eight-by-four foot etched Plexiglas piece called “Sfinks” .
“It references classical art history, it references pop art history, the low-brow crowd like at CPOP loves it, traditionalists love it. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love this work and it’s just so amazing and I love the fact that it lights itself. I’ve never seen a piece of artwork light itself like that. So, it’s got all these references that he’s pulling in… all these iconic images. Just amazing stuff.”
Topher Crowder’s “Sfinks” is a biomorphic woman. But move in closer to the green Plexiglas and various systems such as automotive, computer and coral emerge… making up that woman. A woman made in extremely fine detail.
And those fine details take time to create. In fact, Crowder spent more than five-months completing “Sfinks”.
(sounds of etching)
That’s the sound of Crowder at work on his latest etched piece. When I visited him late last month he was preparing works for his MFA show… which opens this weekend. He says that deadline means added pressure. With such an etcher… breaks are needed now and then.
“Then you can’t hear for five minutes… that buzzing… I put the headphones on but still that droning. It’s like being in a bee’s nest. You have to take a break. So, you brain kind of turns into Jell-O, so, you go out there and paint.”
And just a few feet away in Crowder’s studio… are the paintings he does when the buzzing and heat from the etcher gets too much. His current paintings are big pop art influenced mash-ups …
“Sort of a slam between two pop things… you have comic books and high fashion female footwear. So, you have like… Captain America and a Louis Vuitton Kitten Heel.”
While the etching work is very much about using fine lines… the paintings are more rounded. Crowder says the fine detail work of the etchings…
“are like maze making. While the comic book shoe paintings are like serving an 8 course dinner and just throwing it on the table… instead of setting up all pretty and nice you just dump it. There’s no thought… it’s just dumping it. And it’s such a release. In that case, both works are… they are strong to me because I need one to do the other.”
It’s that need to do the work that led Crowder back to school after taking the 1990’s off. Originally, he attended the Center for Creative Studies in the late 80’s…but he ran out of money, forcing him to drop out and get a day job. With a wife and his 40 hour a week job, Crowder didn’t have the time to paint and draw. But he says the creativity found other outlets.
“I started landscaping the backyard with bowling balls. We live in Livonia… so, I have about 250 bowling balls, I use them as lawn decorations in the backyard and my wife was kind of like “what are you doing?”… you know, these little creative spurts would come out.”
So, after a decade away from painting…he picked up a brush again around the year 2000… and started take night classes at Wayne State towards his art degree. During that time, Crowder studied under Associate Professor Jeff Abt. Abt says when Topher Crowder first came back to school he struggled with painting… but his ever present sketchbooks showed remarkable work.
“The drawings had a kind of intricacy and sort of private visual vocabulary that was really striking and original.”
Abt says one of the stunning things about Crowder’s pen and ink work is how he creates it.
“They are not conceived in a traditional way. Quite often he has a kind of general idea about how he is going to start a drawing and where he wants to go with it but the imagery to a very large extent is worked out as he goes. So, they are kind of like Jazz in way. He starts in one place and ends up somewhere else and I don’t think even he knows how he’s going to get from one place to the other until it’s done.”
And it’s that free flow of ideas packed densely that drew area musician and art collector Ken Stanley to purchase one of Topher Crowder’s works about three years ago.
“When you’re looking at different works of art… a particular piece may be a short story or an epigram or something. This is a novel… that’s what I’m saying about the detail of Topher’s work. I’m not finished with the novel yet, I still have several more chapters to go.”
The piece Stanley owns is called “The Executive”… it’s one of the more unique pieces in Crowder’s large scale pen and ink drawings…since it can be hung from any angle.
“I have it hanging at the foot of my bed when I wake up in the morning… when I open my eyes it’s the first thing that I see. And sometimes when I’m putting on a shirt or something I’ll say “I’ll look at this little bit here in the middle because I haven’t really studied that”. So, he gives you great value because there’s so much here… so, you get great value.”
Professor Abt says while much of Crowder’s work references contemporary sources… there’s much more going on.
“For somebody that doesn’t know Topher well or somebody who might encounter one of those enormous drawings in a gallery, they would probably be inclined to think about those images so much in terms of the history of graphic novels or comic book culture in this country or just in terms of the technique… just the technical terms. What they would miss, and what I think is so interesting about Topher, is that they are a way by which he assimilates information about the world about him. That is a kind of language for him.”
Back at the studio… before I left Crowder he shared a few thoughts about what it takes to show his work.
“I don’t know if you parked next to me… I’ve got that big white van. I deliver my own work. Like last summer I drove out to La Jolla twice. You gotta drive out there to drop the work off and then you gotta drive back to pick it up. I went out to L.A., down to Florida. I like delivering the work. I like the idea that I’m the band. That’s the band van.”
And Topher Crowder’s van will be pulling up to Wayne State University this week. The month-long Masters in Fine Art Thesis Exhibition opens tomorrow evening with an artist reception at the Art Department’s gallery on campus from 5pm to 8pm.