For Northern Irish artist Dawn Crothers, fallout from the political unrest of the 1980s helped guide her movement from sculpture towards painting, and from abstraction and still lifes towards playful, thickly layered animal figures. The optimism and humor in her recent work comes from a desire to provoke hope and joy in her viewers, a goal she achieves consistently. The influence of years of sculpture remain evident in the generously applied and shaped quantities of oil paints that are another trademark of Crothers’ aesthetic.
The Belfast-based artist’s preferred subjects are barnyard animals — to which she often gives names — rendered in an exuberant expressionistic style. Following an encounter with a Matisse painting of a snail, she began painting those in great numbers too, with swirling, sculptural quantities of paints for shells. Whether it’s the innumerable shades of white in a sheep’s wool or the complex systems of color in a rooster’s plumage, superb formal exercises in patterning and layering recur throughout her animal paintings.