Wrinkled paper, from exercise in VS-280 Week One.
My name is Alex Craghead. My parents had the humor to give me the full name Alexander Benjamin Craghead—that's right, initials of "A.B.C." I grew up in Portland, Oregon, in a family that had a lot of visual talents but who were not "artists" in the professional sense. My mother, for example, used to paint quite a lot in both oils and watercolors, mostly landscapes, and several of her paintings hung on the walls of the house where I grew up. My older sister had a talent for drawing, and when she went to work n grocery store management she used to draw products for the store advertisements. My older brother used to paint a lot in acrylics, and tried to exhibit his work in galleries for a time—although he no longer participates in the arts/economics system, he still paints for enjoyment.
As for me? I grew up in this environment, and I also grew up watching PBS how-to programs like Bill Alexander and Bob Ross, and I simply never stopped drawing or painting. At some point in my teens I stopped using other people's photographs as a source, as I wanted my paintings to be fully my own. Then I began to concentrate on certain subjects, thinking that I needed to specialize in order to distinguish my work. (These areas were local buildings/landscapes, and railway subjects.) Most paintings of this period are small watercolors, because I was using inexpensive watercolor paper tablets and inexpensive paints from the local stationery store.
Still later—in my early 20s perhaps—I began to widen my ambitions. I began to paint far larger paintings, wanting to get beyond the conventions of tablets dictating the size and scale of my work. I began to think differently about subjects, thinking more about how to capture places, and thinking about series rather than genres, as if a painting or set of paintings were stories rather than random views along a theme.
I have an ambiguous relationship with technical skills and precision. I often strive for as much structure and composition as I can muster, a set of preferences and skills honed by many years of photography, but I also do not want to control too much. Watercolor as a medium often has a mind of its own, and I enjoy the way that the medium itself can shape the image with me, that the medium is expressive of brushstrokes and emotions. In my ideal, a painting both seems "real" yet also shows how it was worked, shows where the brush touched, and how, and where the paint flowed a little.
To return for a moment to subject, I am primarily interested in what J.B. Jackson called "a sense of place." This is more than recording spatial relationships visually. This is about something much harder to define, a certain character that imbues places. Perhaps this is a bit mystical, but I simply o not believe in the existence of interchangeable space, and paintings are the purest way that I can make a declaration of this faith.
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