Crews-Chubb has developed an intensely physical mixed-media painting style, for which paint is smeared with the fingers, scratched with a stick, glopped on straight from the tube, sprayed from a can, and mixed into sand or pumice gel. The combination of this 'wild' use of materials with historical subject matter is a recurring characteristic of his work.
In his Immortals series Crews-Chubb was particularly interested in international pre-historic sculptures that depict non-human figures such as deities; he has experimented with their postures and expressions to create his own fantastical figures.
Drawn to deities that evoke a sense of the imposing, surreal and monstrous, Crews-Chubb's abstracted mixed media paintings feature his own unique creations. The androgynous or genderless figures have their own identity, and the artist views them as 'not too dissimilar to Frankenstein's monsters. The title Immortals also refers to the fact that throughout history humans have 'immortalised' themselves, by building monuments, creating works or art, etc.
Immortal II (turquoise), 2022, (oil, oil bar, acrylic, ink, charcoal, spray paint, sand, coarse pumice gel and collaged fabrics on canvas)
'For this work, I was looking at protector deities, which I first encountered at temples in Bali six years ago. These figures are often in front of the temples and they have this gesture that signals people to stop'.
The three figures that appear almost fused together were inspired by a tiny 19th century alabaster sculpture, The Three Graces in the Ashmolean.
Immortal XVI, 2022, (oil, oil bar, acrylic, ink charcoal, spray paint, sand, coarse pumice gel and collaged fabrics on canvas)
This work was inspired by the dismembered cast of a pedimental sculpture from Eleusis and a tilted small head from 2nd or 3rd century Ghandara, both in the Ashmolean's collection.
This painting of a mask is representative of Crews-Chubb's most abstracted works.
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