Irene Crowe

Irene Crowe is a Sydney-based painter whose work emerges from a deeply felt enquiry into perception, memory, and the emotional life of landscape. A child of a migrant family, Crowe came to painting by degrees: first through an academic engagement with legal history and culture, then through drawing, and finally through the more fluid, intuitive possibilities of paint itself. Her practice holds these strands together. The paintings begin with dripped acrylic, charcoal-infused washes, and loose accumulations of gesture, through which the image gradually surfaces—less constructed than discovered, as though developing in emulsion.

The tonal landscapes gathered here were shaped during a turbulent period in the artist’s life, in the wake of motherhood, when painting had to be returned to with renewed purpose. In these works, Crowe reflects on a contemporary experience of nature increasingly mediated by screens: landscapes remembered as digital impressions rather than encountered in person, Hence their blurred, half-remembered quality—the sense of a place both familiar and just beyond reach.

In these ‘cloudscapes’, light seems to permeate the surface from within, while in the larger abstractions the mark-making grows more direct, at times recalling the restless tracery of scribbly gum, introducing a tensile energy into these otherwise meditative fields

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Irene Crowe

To Build a Fire, 2025

100 x 100 cm

$2,400

Can you tell us about the early years of your practice? Exactly how did you find your way to artmaking?

My journey into artmaking was a gradual transition from an academic interest in our collective human experiences to a creative exploration of it. As a child of a migrant family, I remember being told I could never pursue art making as a “career”. So instead, I studied legal history and culture at university, as I’ve always been fascinated by how historical perspectives give insight into human perception and ways of thinking.

In my early years, I sketched with felt-tip and pencil, mostly buildings and landscapes (in small format) — capturing all the awe-inspiring places that I had travelled to. I had also attended painting classes held by other artists (like Sally Ryan, Lorraine Loots and Claudia Rilling), as I was eager to learn; however, I was always intimidated by the medium of paint — by the precision of colour mixing and how unforgiving it can be sometimes.

My experiences being around other creatives inspired me to experiment. So one day, I decided to work more fluidly with paint over a large canvas, and it was incredible. The act of layering over the canvas became a personal unburdening, where each mark unleashed both difficult and healthy emotions, balancing each other, giving equal weight and permission to occupy the same space.

The artwork would slowly emerge in front of me (the challenge was knowing when to stop), but I found that there was such joy in this process. I fell in love with abstract painting from that moment.

As an abstract painter, what role does spontaneity play in your work, and how does a painting begin?

Planning and spontaneity work together during my process. I usually start my process by reviewing hundreds of images and photographs of places that remind me of a feeling, whether felt during my travels or my state of mind at the time. This process informs the colours and form that begin my work.

I then initiate the canvas by randomly dripping and spreading acrylic paint or charcoal-infused washes, which pool into an organic or accidental form. Spontaneity and my intuition create a steady logic within the initial chaos and mess, driving the work forward. I tend to react to the image as it develops (with a palette knife and brush), almost like a photo developing in emulsion — turning a random drip into an image that makes sense to me and hopefully resonates with the viewer.

Music, photographs and cinema are highly influential in my art making, and I usually have a piece of cinema in mind as I work on a canvas. Painting for me has always been an exploration of how we see as individuals and how we’re influenced by our individual and cultural memories — captured in a similar way through photographs, music or movies.

Irene Crowe

Coles Bay Sunrise, 2025

Is there a narrative push to your tonal-scapes? Can you tell us the story of these works? Do you consciously reference landscape, or does it enter subconsciously?

My tonal works emerged during a transitional period in my life. At this time, my painting practice was a bit of a mess, in part from the exhaustion of mothering, the output from my last two shows, and a build up of questions on what to paint in this turbulent time. I thrashed many, many paintings in this period and had many conversations with fellow artists, exploring how to depict landscapes and perspectives of art today.

In my conversations, I found a theme emerging, that our experiences of nature are becoming increasingly digital. We are collectively experiencing nature as a digital archive, remembering landscapes through the screens that capture them rather than the texture of gnarly bark, the scent of honeyed petals, or the salt-haze sound of the tide. This directly translates to the quiet undercurrent of fragility in these tonal works, capturing the sensation of moving through a landscape, like the blurry view from the car window or from a half-remembered dream. To the viewer, this place is familiar, whether in a dream or movie, they are left to ask, “why do I know this place?”.

Can you identify a work you hold particularly close in the collection and tell us why?

The two works that I hold particularly close are The Lookout and Out of the shore. After I became a mother, life became more complex and fractured. Painting seemed so inconsequential compared to the profound act of creating and caring for human life. I needed to find a way to make my paintings “matter” again. These works, although still intuitive, allowed me to be more intentional and helped me find the clarity in my voice that motherhood helped streamline. These works allowed me to successfully navigate back to my space of freely creating.