Nant Ffrancon I - Daniel Crawshaw


Daniel Crawshaw g.1967

 

Mae peintio Daniel Crawshaw yn seiliedig ar ei brofiadau o deithio drwy diroedd garw ac anghysbell o Gymru. Mae ei luniau bron ffotograffig o fynyddoedd Eryri gyda eira yn drwch drostynt yn cael eu gwneud ar ôl teithiau maes helaeth o dirwedd urddasol Gogledd Cymru.

In my photo based landscapes I am drawn to qualities unique to the medium of painting and its history. To me a painting is a hand-made object brought into fruition over time. Once complete it might stand as testament to its own distillation or achieve a duality where recollection and the apparent immediacy of an image are combined in a single statement.

In chromatically sparse renderings of remote terrain I aim to achieve a sense of monumentality and the ‘sublime’ in works of varying scale. Avoiding lists of components I try to occupy the pictorial spaces where other painters may have been, whether they be the dark vistas of Bosch or the delicate inflections of Morandi I render empty scenes that only hint at human presence.

I have a particular approach to my source material, taking my own photographs and looking for common structures in both familiar and strange places - small instances, magnified, adjusted and re-rendered in oil paint. There is a steady methodology to my production- squaring up 5’ x7’ prints I work logically through the detail, concentrating on recapturing the whole.

Maybe the paintings invite the response of a ‘double take’ appearing to be something they are not: immediate, photographic, familiar, yet distant, ephemeral and resonant in a wholly other way, material objects in their own right that suggest the realm of the sublime.