Selected Portraits, 1994-2026

Portraiture has served as a steady thread within Crowle’s practice. This figurative work appears across several mediums — painting, drawing, etching, and woodcut — and is most often developed within a monochromatic or limited color palette.

Portraits are made from photographs taken by the artist, frequently transferred through projection or transfer. These methods allow the structure of the photograph to guide composition while the final image develops through slower decisions made by the artists hand. The process often becomes a way of returning to an image repeatedly, considering it through different materials and approaches.

Occasionally, the same portrait is made more than once. These repeated attempts place less emphasis on a final likeness and more on the shifts that occur between versions, an interest developed in early experimentation with printmaking and editions.

James, Red, Cad, 1994
Oil on Board
24 x 24 in.

Image:
Amanda with her portraits,
Grant St studio house, 2004

The portrait works also operate across mediums, moving between drawing, painting, and printmaking as part of a broader transdisciplinary approach to image-making. A single image may appear in several forms or be revisited over time through different materials.

This thinking parallels the printmaking tradition of the variable edition, in which each impression of a plate is intentionally altered rather than repeated identically. Variation in ink, surface, or pressure produces a series of related but distinct images. Within the portrait work, this idea extends beyond printmaking itself: the same subject may be translated through multiple processes, allowing differences in material and method to become part of the meaning of the image.