Folding Origami Boats: Erin Crowe

She greets me with an origami boat invitation to her daughter’s 5^th birthday party. While I’m oohing and awing over the clever way that she has extended the party’s theme to the invitation, she’s moved on to inquiring about my exams, explaining her timing strategies to accommodate pervasive tardiness, suggesting a bistro in Mile End, all while attending to her smiley 4 month old and getting tickets for us to see the Matisse cut outs exhibit at the Tate Modern. This is characteristic of Erin Crowe, a painter, who has a way of constantly juggling multiple activities and ideas while also truly relishing the moment.

We float through the Matisse show independently, coming together to revel in the overwhelming color and size of The Snail and the relative subtlety of Oceania, The Sky. Erin found Jazz to be as remarkable for illustrating his cut paper technique as showcasing his whimsical handwriting. His drafts for the Vence Chapel had us planning a pilgrimage to Provence to see the real deal. As we neared the end and The Bell began resembling a butternut squash, we realized it was time for lunch and headed for the museum’s café. “It’s not amazeballs but they usually have a nice salad.” Along with smoked salmon, which Erin declared to be, ”way better than Lidl’s,” we shared some Bayonne ham, a few summer salads of tomatoes, squash, lentils, and barley and some good sourdough, which I smothered in butter. As we dig in, she recounts that time when her fate intertwined with that of Alan Greenspan.

During his tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, Greenspan gave no broadcast interviews. Seeking insight into his notoriously cryptic commentary on the economy, in August of 2005, CNBC turned the microphone over to 18 larger than life portraits of the man himself, painted by Erin. In a style she describes as “clunky naïvete”, each painting captured facial expressions that financial analysts read for clues about the future of the market. Mirroring this idea that confidence in the market is the key its health, CNBC took Greenspan’s temperature in its analysis of Erin’s paintings. Titles like, "If You Say So," "I Gotta Tell Ya," and "Humpf” suggested the humorous futility of these endeavors.

And yet, when the gallery plugged the phone back in after the CNBC broadcast, it didn’t stop ringing. She sold all 18 paintings and by the close of a successive show entitled, “Goodbye Greenspan” in 2006, Erin had painted and sold nearly 50 works of the man. By and large it was Wall Street bankers who purchased the paintings.  

While buyers and media may have attributed Erin’s foray into Greenspan portraiture to an obsession with the chairman, the paintings can be interpreted as an extension of her interest in creating multiples. She wondered what it would mean to create many imperfect copies of an image. In one exploration of this idea, she revisited a painting of a clown that she made as a child. Erin went on to paint nearly a dozen clowns, each one slightly different from the others, for example, some wear spotted collars, while others sport more minimalist costumes. Four of them were the constant dining companions of my adolescence, hanging on a wall in our dining room.

In the clown and Greenspan series she was pursuing the conceptual idea of repetition, rather than emphasizing technical advancement. As an undergrad at the University of Virginia, some faculty critiqued her perchance for copying as hindering her development as an artist but it was exactly that regression to a time before she had the knowledge of art “bearing down on me” that interested her. In the end, “artists copy all the bloomin’ time.” She interrogated this tradition when she engaged in a back and forth with photographs of the elusive Federal Reserve chairman and ultimately with her own work. (For another discussion on the originality of art, see the furor that Marina Abramovic’s current exhibit at the Serpentine Gallery has inspired with some critics claiming she’s indebted to Mary Ellen Cowell for the “nothing” at the center of her show, while others note that art-making is a never-ending dialogue.)

With Greenspan about to step down as chairman of the Federal Reserve and his legacy being widely celebrated, the timing of the show may have had something to do with the paintings’ popularity. Erin compares Wall Street’s fascination with the paintings to teenagers expressing their adulation for sports and pop stars by hanging posters of them on their bedroom walls. For a class of financial experts in an era of accumulation the Greenspan portraits then represented a glorification of their adult idol.

But Erin is not bothered by her work taking on a life of its own. While her intentions with the project—the “fanaticism of creating 35 Alan Greenspan paintings”—may have been missed by those who have since commissioned her to paint portraits, she finds it amusing that the world of finance would seek Greenspan’s wisdom through her paintings. “I’m a people pleaser.” Seeing people take pictures of themselves in front of her paintings was thrilling. "I've never had people respond so positively to my work," Erin told the Washington Post in 2005.

In her post-Greenspan life, Erin earned her MFA at Goldsmiths. Since graduating in 2007, she has found art-making to be a lonelier endeavor compounded by the limited communication implicit in raising young children. Towards the end of our lunch Erin tells me that she’s getting rid of her studio to focus on being a mum. A step away from art, one might ask? And yet, embracing that one-way conversation may just be the answer to her search for a creative dialogue. How many other 5 year olds get to celebrate their birthday with a barge ride on the nearby canal, a piñata cake, and pulled pork?