Busacca Gallery

"Sorcerer" is a sizable artwork created using oil stick, wax, and graphite on canvas, measuring 60" x 48" inches. Ford Crull, an American Neo-Symbolist painter born in 1952, is known for his distinctive style. Explore his art, auction results, and sale prices at galleries and auctions worldwide. “The ambiguity of the image is central to my expression in art. The derivation of my symbols, drawn from the oceanic flow of an unconscious, devolved dream state, reflects a necessity for metamorphosis and recombination that deprives the image of any safe haven. We are dedicated to enriching our customers' lives by discovering, creating, and showcasing the finest art available in the world today. As taste-makers, art advisers, consultants, and publishers of great stories, we are committed to excellence." If you have any questions please contact Busacca Gallery.

Ford Crull explores the expressive power of personal and cultural symbols in a series of densely painted and vividly colored compositions. He uses identifiable images such as hearts, wings, crosses, and the human figure, as well as geometrical emblems and abstract forms whose meanings are less explicit. Words, in the form of cryptic, fleeting phrases, also animate Crull’s pictorial world. Crull employs a myriad of symbols which variously imply a sexual unfolding, romantic suffering, occult wisdom, and transcendental release. These symbols coexist in a psychic atmosphere in which they overlap, dissolve, and reappear with a kind of furious insistence. The heart is among the most frequent of these symbols, combining love on both physical and spiritual levels. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Dayton Art Institute, and the Brooklyn Museum. His paintings were included in the important 1989 Moscow exhibition, “Painting After the Death of Painting,” curated by Donald Kuspit. Recent exhibitions have included shows in Shanghai, London, Milan, New York and Seattle.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-symbolism

The core philosophy of neosymbolism, like that of its predecessor, is the idea of "correspondences", the "emblematic order" of a world in which technology and the industrial reality have not yet drowned the forces of mysticism and belief. In a world where visual images exist to generate sales and revenue Neosymbolist imagery attempts to preserve the relationship between image and the human soul. The imagery is necessarily representational rather than abstract. It borders on the narrative, but stops short of the commercial trap of illustration to convey an idea for profit. Oddly, artists like Norman Rockwell could qualify as Neosymbolist painters in that they adopt a social and cultural undercurrent and convey it in terms of the cultural cliche'; the image as representative of core aspects of the culture. The same is not true, however, of the generally accepted idea of commercial illustration which attempts more to influence cultural, political, and economic ideology than it tries communicate an existent reality. Neosymbolism is fairly well hidden within the culture with few references and almost no broad based visibility. In 1988 A_Demos,Nick published a book in an edition of two. This was the first visible sign of the idea underlying this philosophy.Nick A_Demos developed this first book of Neosymbolism into paintings.Nick A_Demos was the first to coin the word Neosymbolism as evidenced by neosymbolism.com as the first use of this word and documented by the domain name, see link to this site.



The Symbolist movement in art was first proposed by the poet, Jean Moreas, in a manifesto published in 1886. The resulting wave of influence had an impact on all the arts and ultimately impacted the development of Expressionism, of Fauvism, of Italian Futurism, and of most of the lineage of modern art as we know it, even though the movement itself lived a life of only around thirty years.