Crowe was a painter and craft worker who was born in Claremont, Perth but brought up on the family property at Port Headland. After school in Perth he went straight to work on the family property. Although he wished to pursue an art career this was discouraged by his father. He left the property and went prospecting but had little luck before the Great Depression hit. He commenced an engineering course at the Kalgoorlie School of Mines but had only completed two years when war in the Pacific broke out. He enlisted in the Royal Australian Engineering Corps and saw service in the Pacific theatre.
After the war Crowe undertook a rehabilitation fine arts course at Melbourne Technical School from 1947-1950. He returned to Western Australia and taught at Scotch College from 1951-1953 and then became a graphic artist with the Visual Education Department. From 1956 he became a full time painter supported in part by his wife Lala who was a teacher. He cites as influences Robert Juniper, Elise Blumann and Sam Fullbrook. He shared the West Australian section of the 1959 Perth Prize for Contemporary Art with Maurice Stubbs, won a Narrogin Prize in 1960 and the Bunbury art prize in 1961. He was friendly with Bishop Appleton and undertook a number of ecclesiastical commissions including objects for: the chapel in Bishop’s House, Wollaston College, St Mary’s West Perth, Marist Bros Chapel in Graylands, Monash University Chapel Melbourne and Scotch College Chapel.
Crowe and his wife travelled in Europe in 1966. In 1985 he moved to live in York and began to hold more solo exhibitions. Judith McGrath wrote of his exhibition in 1994 that “[w]orks by Irwin Crowe currently on exhibition at Gomboc Gallery attest to a lifetime of looking, absorbing, experimenting and perfecting the art of painting. This is evident in the artist’s expertise in multiple styles and varied subject matter. The unifying factors of this diverse collection of fine acrylic paintings are Crowe’s command of colour, sensitivity of line and careful manipulation of the medium to create interesting textural effects.” Of his retrospective at the Moore’s Building in Fremantle in 1996 the art critic David Bromfield wrote the following: “At his best he is a skilful colourist working in very high key harmonies. He produced figurative and abstract designs with equal facility. When Crowe relies entirely on his abstract design sense he is also highly successful, as in Red Linear Experiment. The source of many of Crowe’s concerns lies in the later cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque, as in the Two Red Pots. This is a highly enjoyable exhibition which deserves wide viewing.” This was quite a review from a man who was acerbic about major painter Robert Juniper’s work.
- Writers:
- Dr Dorothy Erickson
- Date written:
- 2010
- Last updated:
- 2011
