WAY OUTSIDER ART
Am I for real? Or am I full of shit,
hiding behind excuses?"

www.citypaper.net

Local multimedia artist Rah Crawford considered both these realities recently after reading Steven Pressfield's "life-altering" The War of Art, a paperback that frames the perpetual artistic predicament: a simple case of put up (drop that day job and devote your life to creating) or shut up (continue punching the clock that's ticking your life away). Earlier this year, Crawford chose to quit his pay-the-bills work and pursue what he calls NPIC (Neoteric Pop-Iconic Clairvoyance), a trademarked approach to art that he's developed over the past decade.

"NPIC is a new way for artists to communicate with modern man," Crawford explains via an impassioned e-mail exchange. "It's a two-dimensional, multimedia pop-art puzzle, satisfying the viewer on both a conscious and subconscious level—a rabbit hole that goes as deep as you want it to."

If you're thinking, "Hey man, that sounds like hippie talk, and I've seen those Magic Eye paintings before," you're totally off. Crawford's work is an ultramodern meeting of graffiti tags, pop visuals, hot-and-cool tones of green, blue, red, orange and yellow, and the sort of postmodern graphics that usually pop off the page of Puma ads. Sometimes the figures are everyday people (the troubled "Blue Momma" captured mid-drag with a cigarette); other times they're products of popular culture (the Castro-channeling "Bearded Che" and a portrait commissioned by poet/musician Jill Scott). The pieces are similar in how they ask the viewer to look beyond their aesthetic appeal to unveil cryptic typography ("look under the paint," "Americon"). Within these words we find allusions to the human condition and the artist himself, something Crawford plans to explore further in three more "acts" of his "Welcome to Earth" series, which begins with this week's "'Human'' exhibit.

"I wouldn't dare insult my audience with empty pretty pictures," Crawford says. "I believe life is a puzzle. Sometimes we have to hold out for the right piece to come along."