Gordon Robichaux is pleased to present an exhibition of recent watercolor paintings by Stephanie Crawford, on display alongside an installation of artwork, documentation, and ephemera that contextualize five decades of her extraordinary creative life as a celebrated jazz vocalist and visual artist. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Throughout her years of public life as a performing artist, Crawford has remained committed to her solitary painting and drawing practice. She paints from still life compositions she constructs in her home-studio, surrounded by walls layered with photographs, drawings, and ephemera, which she describes as “memories, remnants, trinkets, objects d'art, and keys to the past.” Within this domestic space, she arranges and paints artificial flowers in vases, fruit, and various objects she collects for their beauty. She paints from observation, moving freely between representation and abstraction, and remarks that, for her, “Abstraction is another form of representation.” Her deliberate marks pool and bleed color across the surface of the page: "You can't control it,” she notes. “You can try, but watercolor does what it wants. In most mediums, paint stays where you put it. Watercolor complies with gravity and parallels the improvisation of jazz.”

Throughout her career, Crawford has revisited the convention of the still life. Her return to a specific composition within a series of paintings affirms the generative possibilities of artmaking. She finds renewed inspiration and reverie in memory, the ephemeral, and in her process, “because at the end of the day, after it all,” she says, “I believe in beauty—mysterious, devastating beauty. That’s what I’m trying to capture.”