I was born in 1956 in British Columbia. After a youth spent in Vancouver and at Long Beach on Vancouver Island, I studied fine art at the University of California at Irvine, industrial design at Western Washington University and architecture at the University of British Columbia. My family has moved to Mexico and I married a Kiwi.
For the last 30 years my paintings and screen prints have been of the landscape where I lived and traveled in British Columbia, Alaska, Mexico and New Zealand. My insights have come from my relationship to the water trees and rocks of these places. I find myself in them and they are in me.
Repeating patterns fascinated me. I kept searching and painting them till I understood them in a more meaningful way. At first, they seemed random, then there was a strange order to them. They were in dynamic moving systems. Smaller self similar parts nested inside bigger pieces. The bigger pieces had shapes like the smaller pieces. They were the same but different and worked together to make a whole.
Many ripples of water made a wave. Many rocks made a mountain. Many leaves made a tree. Many trees made a forest. Many trees rocks and waters made a whole world. Words pulled themselves into sentences. Sentences pulled themselves into ideas. Ideas pulled themselves into stories. The many stories make me.
Kent Crawford
