Journeys: Paintings by Rebecca Crowell and Thaddeus Radell

Rebecca Crowell and Thaddeus Radell both exploit the media of oil and cold wax. Their very different approaches to painting share the spotlight in the first exhibition of 2019 at Thomas Deans Fine Art. Rebecca Crowell’s abstract paintings have been called “rich, lustrous, and above all, meditative.” Thaddeus Radell’s narrative paintings have been described as poetic, mysterious, and epic “in their rich concentration of pigment suspended in beeswax, sculpted with palette knives and small brushes.”​Crowell's complex, organic surfaces evolve over time through intuitive decisions about color, texture, and format. Each painting comprises many layers, into which she scrapes, dissolves, and excavates for what lies beneath. In her latest work, geometric compositions predominate in a balance of darks and lights.​Thaddeus Radell, too, incorporates a variety of techniques in the creation of his paintings, narratives that he describes as “profoundly abstracted figure compositions in an undefined setting.”  Radell begins his paintings intuitively with random marks that establish larger masses—heads, torsos, and limbs. Gesture and rhythmic distance between figures evolve to animate his “scenes.” Ravishing colors glow with the matte luster of his wax medium.