Biography:

Simon Crane was born and raised in San Francisco. While he is a city kid at heart having lived in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area, he is deeply influenced by equal time spent in the granite backcountry of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains packing donkeys and exploring remote mountain meadows. He earned a Breakdancing trophy from Lake County Fair ‘86 and later a BA with a major in Studio Art from Lewis and Clark College ‘97. His early work featured large ceramic sculptures, printmaking, and encaustic exploring iteration and abstract accumulations. Simon is a painter and educator, living and working in Portland, Oregon.

Artist’s Statement

My practice explores the human impulse towards mark making and storytelling. I am interested in the way that lines come to life -- from powerful and arcing lines that cut through space, to fragile threads that invisibly connect and resonate. The discovery of these lines is at the core of my work, manifesting as characters, circuitry, and language.

My paintings explore iterations of shape and rhythm that exist in both the human and non-human world. Through invented syntax and glyphs, endlessly rehearsed but always improvised, my work explores the parallels between the material world and human construction of meaning. My practice engages with the space between the organic and industrial, the wild and controlled; always resisting perfection and leaning toward weird idiosyncratic moments that feel more immediate and honest.

In the high desert and on alpine mountaintops, the dramatic scale of these harsh environments often contrast with the delicate colorful plants which thrive in a seemingly inhospitable setting -- I love these moments of colorful energy, deeply pigmented, saturated, fragile and primal. 

Just as mold, lichens, and vines grow over neglected metal as it rusts, I’m attracted to layers of visual narrative and the tension between natural and manmade, the rhythms of patina and decay, and the depth of layers that evoke time passing.  In the landscapes of urban/wild spaces and in my abstract paintings, I follow “lines of desire”, those footpaths etched into the grass by humans and animals alike that are traces of previous pathways, coexisting in the dance between creation and entropy.