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 "...A beam or something fell eight or ten stories and smacked the sidewalk along side him. It brushed pretty close to him but didn't touch him . . . He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."
--Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon

 THE WORKS OF WARREN CRISWELL
AT THE WICHITA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
Some Notes by the Artist

This exhibition is a sampling of my paintings and works on paper done over the past 21 years, but I wouldn't want to call it a retrospective. Too many key works are unavailable at present, and besides, I'm not in retro mode yet. Give me another couple of decades. The earliest work is the watercolor Sunday at Yogi's (1979) and the most recent The Samaqueca (oil on panel, 2000). Looking at the whole body of work, several visual themes--such as highways, the homeless, strip clubs, the ocean--are obvious. From the '70s on my work seems to have a narrative tendency, and much of the narrative material comes from fiction, philosophy, mythology, operas, movies and the history of painting.

So far I haven't said anything that viewers can't see for themselves, and I don't intend to spill my guts about the "inner content" (if any) of my images. This is not a thing an artist should talk much about, in my opinion. It can bias a viewer who might otherwise have seen something in a work that the artist is unaware of. To illustrate what I mean, here are two excerpts from texts about my paintings by very perceptive and knowledgeable critics:
 


Don Giovanni Impenitente, 1999, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches

 Title Page, Copyright, Installation Views, Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, More Installation Views, Index

 

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