The Works of Warren Criswell at WCFTA, page 2

THE WORKS OF WARREN CRISWELL (Continued)

"From a distance, a viewer could think that Warren Criswell is a faintly romantic neoclassicist, painting grand allegories with vague references to the old masters. A second look reveals that the Arkansas artist is something completely different.
"Criswell, who is in his 60s, is a wildly funny self-satirist. His splendidly painted but unexpectedly comic canvases use classic motifs to explore contemporary discontent in male-female relationships.
"Criswell's takeoff on Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus' is the clearest illustration of this.... Criswell's self-portrait recurs elsewhere as an armor-clad St. George on a small-town main street.... The artist's also wanders bewildered amid a dark wood of female-torsoed trees ('In the Forest of the Dryads'). In another painting, he's a rabbi menaced by the clay golem he has brought to life in a contemporary bedroom, while the unconcerned young woman beside him reads a magazine.
Each of these thoroughly modern mythologies seems to tell a similar tale. The fact that the same models recur in painting after painting heightens the sense that this is all one multilayered morality play that the artist is recounting in different versions...."

From Jerry Cullum's review of an exhibition of 11 paintings by Criswell at Raymond Lawrence Gallery, Atlanta, in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Friday, Jan. 29, 1999.

Golden Apples, 1996, oil on wood,
36 x 52 inches*

St. George & the Dragon, 1998, oil on wood, 48 x 36 inches*

The Storm, 1992, oil on linen,
48 x 36 inches, collection Julia J. Norrell*

*Work not in this exhibition.

"Working with a great economy of iconographic as well as formal means, Criswell [makes] intense, uncanny, highly concentrated images of his own inner life. He has objectified not only his sexual conflicts, but his 'transcendent' position as an artist. It clearly saves him from himself: his art is the saving grace in his 'sick' scenes. It permits him to see his conflict as a kind of theater, and to regard it with irony and finally good humor, that is, as a funny if weird melodrama.
"But make no mistake: his images are grim and sinister. Not only does their tenebrism - their generally Caravaggesque realism, modified by American populist descriptive realism-testify to this, but their setting as well....
"Criswell's pictures are rooted in sexual conflict, but reach deeper, into the mystery of the self."

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