ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Chester, England Crowther grew up in North West England/North Wales and attended English and Welsh schools.  Along with his immediate family he emigrated from Great Britain to the U.S in his teen years. Once settled in Augusta, GA, Crowther completed high school and earned his BFA at Augusta State University soon after. As a student at Augusta State University his passion for painting and drawing was truly recognized.  Feeling a change of scenery was needed Crowther then moved for graduate studies to rural Radford, Virginia located among the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  While attending Radford University he continued to study painting and drawing under Dr. Halide Salam and earned his MFA.  While living in the small mountain town Crowther recognized the similarities between the topography of Appalachia and the rolling hills of North Wales, which became a predominate theme in his early paintings.

Crowther taught at Augusta University, his undergraduate alma mater, from 2006 until 2021 during Covid-19. As well as teaching, he exhibit regularly, mostly in the southeastern United States including Georgia, Virginia, Washington, D.C, Florida and South Carolina, and is active in the local Augusta art community.  His work is heavily focused around experiences in both Great Britain and the landscape of the Deep South, creating large nostalgic oil paintings, melding both regions into loose autobiographical narratives. Crowther is also a keen painter of the nude figure, which he attributes to his mentor and friend Philip Morsberger (a former Ruskin Master of Drawing at Oxford University), Lucian Freud, Euan Uglow, Manet, and The California Bay Area Figurative Painters (notably Richard Diebenkorn and Elmar Bischoff).

Crowther’s current work explores the theme of identity, the psychology of the self, and dealing/living with social anxiety and depression while raising a child in a world that is self-destructing from increasing social/political divides, a global pandemic, and capitalism. In his most recent solo exhibition BE CAREFUL OF THE ANTS: Reinvention and the ART of Plodding Along, Crowther loosely depicted himself as three Greek statues: An Archaic Kouros, the Hellenistic Seated Boxer, and the Classical Spear Bearer (Doryphoros of Polykleitos). “Speaking from the perspective of a parent, rather than a warrior or athlete, I am borrowing the ancient Greek cultural values of what it means to be a hero, but presenting them in a vulnerable and flawed state (a parent managing social anxiety and depression)”.

Although oil paint is his preferred medium, he likes to experiment and work with other media such as printmaking and water based media and often uses collage applications to achieve a final result. As a Senior  Lecturer Crowther enjoys and appreciates the vibrant peer teaching community that comes from working in an academic learning environment. 

photo by Drake White