ManicWorld Magazine

– Five years in the making, where did the initial idea originate?

‘A Dream of Time’ has in some way through its style or composition or palette always been a piece of work that has been in my mind. The flowing forms of dancers, the colours found within nature used to present forms that are other worldly was the aesthetic that I’ve found myself drawn too. For the past 10 years I have been following the techniques of the Old Masters in order to lift a painting up beyond an image and achieve something that, at the very least, I can apply my own personal narrative too. I had the style of the piece in mind for years, however the meaning behind it evaded me and so it sat in the back of my mind whilst other paintings, drawings and training continued to further articulate my visual language. Six years ago (2019) I started a journey of therapy. Anxiety, depression,  a lack of who I was and too much fear or dread was something which I wanted to resolve. Between 2019 and 2024 I followed week after week an unpacking and reframing of my experiences. It was during a titanic shift within my world view and context that in February of 2020 a frozen image popped into my head whilst I was walking and listening to music in which I instantly knew the meaning behind it. I had the narrative and the purpose to the style which I wanted to follow. Once I had the sketch and concept within my mind I then had to work backwards and start to discover the answer of ‘why?’ to what each part of the image meant.      

– Why do you think this project took so long?

There were many aspects to this project which I wasn’t aware would extend it’s creation time. I always knew that it would be a piece that would evolve and adapt with how I saw it, but part of the process was the discovery and world building. A part of the creative process was to write, in a narrative format, the series of events that take us to the final image and during this process I had to uncover logical reasons for the events such as: why is the landscape the way it is? Who is the figure that this story revolves around? Who are they interacting with? What does this lead to? In tandem to my own therapeutic journey the story itself grew and expanded from a singular story to a three part series and it was in Part 1 ‘A Dream of Time’ that I would introduce the viewer to this world. This meant that now it wasn’t a singular painting, but a series of paintings which help to describe the characters within the story. But importantly, they had a logic to me that made sense within the context of the story.

Another large part of the extended creation was the techniques behind the painting. Due to its scale, each figure had to be researched and drawn before applied to the canvas. There was play, there were parts to it which were created before being wiped away. There was a back and forth, and this is before the colour studies. I wanted to explore a luminous quality to the light. A glow. And a technique used by the masters to achieve this is ‘glazing’. This technique is a naturally slow technique: a thin layer of paint applied to a previous layer that is dried and with the nature of oil paint, its drying time can be notoriously long. But there was also discovery and experimentation in which each piece had to be documented and tested elsewhere. It would be, more often then not, that there were at least three or four paintings on easels at the same time.

However! After five years of constant painting, countless drawings, 3 different studios and two house moves later I’m so excited to reveal these series of paintings to the world. ‘A Dream of Time’ A Solo exhibition by Lawrence Crane will be exhibited at Elitha’s Fine Art & Collectibles, 1B Holborn Circus, City of London, London EC1N 2HB 5th – 6th April with a Live performance and reading of ‘A Dream of Time’ on Saturday 5th April