Is this thing on?

Virginia Zabriskie, proud gallerist, and recent recipient of the Archives of American Art's annual medal of honor, drummed her fingers nervously on the desk. In the office almost every day for 52 years might've taken off some of the edge, but there it was again today: the worry that no one will come. Of course we're optimistic, and the lousy economy is hurting almost everyone worse than the gallery, but 3:00 felt pointedly slow today.

"How are we going to get people in here to see this beautiful show?" she asked.
I turned back to my computer. The needs of a gallery are ceaseless, but the owner, indefatigable, wants answers. There will never be a satisfactory amount of foot traffic, even if the place is packed 8 hours a day.

"Why don't I write a gallery blog?" I said, without turning. "You know, create a buzz. Raise our profile on the internets. Information superhighway."
"A buzz?"
"Houk's got one." A buzz? Possibly. A blog? Certainly not.
"What will it cost us?"
"Not a red cent."
"Well, ok. Then I'd say do a couple of gallery blogs."

Roger that, I think. And now I give you...the buzz!
Up now at the gallery: Ralston Crawford, in its last week:

Crawford, popularly known for his paintings, found inspiration in industrial and seafaring scenes. His flattened arrangements of space approached abstraction with a firm belief in working from life rather than imagined geometries.

Born to a sailor-turned-insurance-salesman on the Great Lakes, Ralston Crawford inherited a love of industry that permeated his work both thematically and as personal discipline. Crawford hewed to many of the themes that attracted him in his early life: factories, grain elevators, and naval scenes. Arriving in New York after high school with the intention of attending Pratt Institute, Crawford found himself instead on a boat to Central and South America. The peaceful maritime themes and the un-peopled calm of the sea crop up again and again throughout Crawford’s career.

After a short stint painting animation cells for Disney, Crawford’s artistic training began in earnest at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1927. Hugh Breckenridge, who had also taught John Marin and Charles Demuth, made an impact on the promising painter with a modern formal sensibility and a strong taste for color. Crawford approached his artistic development methodically, tracing the development of modernism painting, from Cézanne to Sheeler. Though he found early success with paintings that were lumped with Precisionism, his aesthetic sensibilities had evolved independently from those of Sheeler and Demuth. Arriving on the scene twenty years Sheeler’s junior, his style was still developing.

Crawford’s precocious career was interrupted by four years of military service. Emerging from World War II, Crawford’s work developed away from its heroic presentations of foundries and grain elevators, and began to flirt more aggressively with frontal, flattened planes of color. Stymied partly by the pigeonhole that came with his early success, Crawford also found himself out of step with the prevailing trends in painting. Pure abstraction was on the rise, but Crawford resolutely maintained his commitment to “the things themselves.” In 1938, he had begun experimenting with photography—first as a tool for his paintings, but soon as a medium of expression in its own right.

By the 50s, Crawford was finding with a lens new formal possibilities – from washed-out headstones in New Orleans, to tangled grids of lobster pots and fishing nets. As black-and-white compositions, the photographs helped him to isolate formal qualities of patches of light, and his paintings gave new attention to geometries of shadows. His photographic work was an exploration parallel to his painting, both embracing the semi-abstract beauty in the world. Having strayed far from the Precisionist appellation applied to his work in the 30s, Crawford pushed his own style further with the painstaking dedication that characterized his career. Diagnosed with cancer in 1971, the indefatigable Crawford continued to work and travel until his death in 1978.