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Alicia Crowley was delighted to hear that her paintings were to be featured in a solo exhibit at a real gallery. She didn't say, "It's about time," even though she has been painting all her life.
"The wait was worth it," she said. "I've had a chance to develop. This is my first show, and it's also a retrospective."
She's 14.
The exhibit at Arthead Gallery in Wallingford opens Sunday with a reception for the artist, from 5 to 8 p.m., and continues through April.
Gallery owner William Wikstrom said the exhibit's not a stunt.
"She earned it," he said. "I'd show these paintings no matter who made them. Her age is not the issue."
Has Arthead ever given a 14-year-old artist a solo exhibit?
"No," he said. "Not even close."
Wikstrom first saw her work last year, when her uncle brought in a print for framing. Wikstrom was bowled over. "Her head is screwed on right," he said. "She has desire, concentration and talent. I think about the early work most artists do, and it's usually small drawings. She's tackling these big paintings right away. There's no sense of sketchy student efforts. She's painting gems."
Crowley's a painter, but that's not all. She's also an advanced brown belt in karate, two degrees from a black belt. She's an A student but doesn't attend more than two classes a day, both in the morning.
"School takes up too much time," she said. "The classes drag on. I like the ones I have now (at Washington Middle School) and I love to see my friends, but I've had teachers who repeat themselves."
Unendurable.
Crowley and her younger brother, Devin, a poet and circus artist, are largely homeschooled by their mother, Caroline Goodell.
Although Crowley hasn't taken any business classes, she has a sharp eye for the bottom line. Hearing that the usual gallery commission is 50 percent, she asked Wikstrom to negotiate. Because she agreed to handle the publicity and provide refreshments at the opening, she talked him into taking 30 percent.
In her gallery show, there will be two prints (reproductions of the paintings), 14 midsized paintings (24 inches by 30 inches) for $450, and three large paintings (4 feet by 5 feet) for $1,200. All are acrylics on canvas, and all are landscapes. Crowley favors heavy colors, scraped down and painted over to silky effect. The colors seem to have flexed their muscles against each other before achieving an orchestrated resolution.
About that publicity. Crowley e-mailed everybody at the P-I, from the janitor to the publisher, alerting them to her debut.
"Not everybody," she protested. "I contacted the people I thought might be interested."
Because I'm the art critic, at least a dozen reporters and editors forwarded her message to me. That means my mailbox was Crowley filled.
Ordinarily, this approach backfires. But even online, her landscapes have a raw and confident quality that gave me pause. Then I looked at her photo. I have shoes older than this kid.
"Don't blame me about the e-mailing," said her mother. "It was her idea."
Art is her idea too.
"I studied dance and classical piano at Cornish," her mother said. "When Alicia was little, I put her in ballet classes. She said, 'I hate pliés.' She heard about karate from one of her friends and wanted to try it. She loved it right away.
"Karate was a surprise to me, and so was painting," Goodell continued. "I have a clear memory of her at 2 saying, 'I want to paint.' I didn't encourage it. It's so messy. Visual art doesn't interest me, and I didn't recognize her painting as anything special. One day her third-grade teacher took me aside and told me she was brilliant, and I had to get classes for her."
Art classes for kids were a disappointment.
"They're all about crafts projects," Crowley said. She is not now nor has she ever been interested in crafts.
At 8, she began taking drawing classes at Pratt Fine Art School.
At 9, the school said she was ready for painting.
"The painting classes are three hours long," Goodell said. "All the students are adults. I wondered how it would work out."
Just fine, thank you.
Crowley has strong people in her family as role models. Her grandfather John Goodell was a documentary filmmaker nominated for an Academy Award for the feature "Always a New Beginning" in 1974. Her grandmother Louise Crowley helped found Radical Women in Seattle in the 1970s.
Her father, Roger Crowley, is a Tibetan Buddhist and an Amtrak porter. Her mother is a spiritual healer and therapist. Does Crowley share her parents' religious beliefs?
"No," she said. "I'm not interested in spirituality."
Crowley's parents aren't raising followers. Independence is what they value, and that's what Crowley gives them.
Her body confidence is reason enough for feminists from her grandmother's generation to feel they have not lived in vain.
"Nobody messes with me," she said. "I can beat my whole class in arm wrestling. If there's candy on my desk and a kid looks at it and sees it's mine, he leaves it alone."
Her mother encouraged karate with an eye to the future. "I knew if she had a black belt before she started high school, what happened to her would be on her terms."
Success is easier to measure in karate than in art. Having a one-person show at age 14 is a good sign, but there are no guarantees.
In the meantime, there's hard work. Crowley pays for materials and tuition by selling her prints and being a teaching assistant. She wants to go to college and hopes for a scholarship. Besides classes at Pratt, she studies privately with an artist named Hiawatha D., a family friend.
She loves her animals, including a beagle, two cats, a parakeet, an aquarium full of fish and a cockatiel that hops up and down when he sees her and likes to hang out on her shoulder.
"What I feel about landscapes I can't always get into my painting, but that's what I want," she said. "I like to look at what other artists are doing and figure it out. One time I painted a tree and it just sat there till I splashed some purple at the bottom and when I stepped back, the tree had taken root."
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