Sensitive Skin
Crowley studied in London and has since exhibited widely throughout the UK. He has undertaken several residencies and mural projects, the latter being apposite to the large scale of much of his work. Sensitive Skin shows the artist's own face superimposed in a ghostly fashion over a background which represents urban decay. The painting contains elements very characteristic of Crowley's work: a house stripped of its outer walls; open doors; a swinging light bulb; steps and staircases; helicopters flying overhead. It is by combining these common objects in such a haunting and strange fashion that the artist touches upon people's innermost fears. While the more disturbing and dreamlike qualities of Crowley's paintings link him to the surrealist movement, his vision of urban decay and intervention in the landscape places him in the tradition of British Romanticism practised by Sutherland (1903-1980) and Piper (b.1903), and indeed of the War Artists of the 1940s.
