Robin Crowley, a Doylestown-area artist for nearly 50 years, likes painting people. “When I was in kindergarten or so, I drew my brother with red hair pushing a lawn mower.”
We can draw a through line from her earliest drawings to her current work. Although she has done many landscapes in the past, she felt compelled to include people in them. “And they had to be active people, doing something specific, even if they were tiny in the painting. To me, that’s interesting,” she said.
Now she is best known for her portraits, often of elderly people. Her work compassionately shows the diary of years in their faces. To faithfully and distinctively render her subjects’ wrinkles, sprouting hairs, and rheumy eyes, she chooses the age-old medium of egg tempera.
Andrew Wyeth is perhaps the best-known modern master of this medium, which is exacting and labor-intensive. Artists don’t buy egg tempera at the art supply store. They make it by draining the liquid of an egg yolk, mixing it with water, a preservative agent, and powdered pigment. Crowley favors oil pastels as the source of her pigments.
Egg tempera doesn’t blend like oils or acrylics. Instead, the artist uses fine brushes and applies strokes of color, cross-hatching them to build up luminosity. It can be painstaking because layers must dry before new layers are applied. The result is worth the effort, creating surfaces that sensitively convey how light interacts with eyes, skin, and hair.
Crowley went to Syracuse University for liberal arts but switched to become a painting major. Then she studied in Greece and London, where she met her husband, a potter. They lived there four years, participating in craft shows and “doing that really hippie thing—I made my own clothes, and we spent nothing.”
When she returned to this area in 1976, she began working for the family business, marketing and advertising products her engineer father designed and manufactured. He invented the digital densitometer, which the printing industry uses to measure the thickness of ink on paper.
Then, for 15 years, she was a personal trainer at Philadelphia Sports Club. “I think the connection was I am interested in the human being and how our bodies look and work.” Then, studying with a local art teacher she found her way back to drawing and painting. She entered the Doylestown Art League and won two awards in shows, which encouraged her.
“In my art, I’m all about bravery! Do something weird and make people think,” she laughingly says. Crowley is “a big fiction reader,” and her works tell stories in strokes of paint, applied slowly, with determination and a great deal of thought.
These solitary creations are balanced by her participation in “lots of art organizations.” Her membership in the Arts and Cultural Council provides a great way to network with local creative people. After all, she has always been interested in what people are doing.
To see more of the artist’s work, visit flickr.com/photos/rcrowley31.
Local Color is a column produced by the Arts & Cultural Council of Bucks County. It appears on the first Thursday of each month.
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