Page 39 - Studio International - April 1974

Alphabet Spire V 1973
SAGE OF MACHINE WIT Laminated wood sculpture, h. 4 ft 6 in

William Crutchfield's work has a special magic.
It is fresh, imaginative, direct and insightful,
and the facility for expressing these qualities
with hilarious humour coupled with formal
vitality is rare in any language. Yet it is
precisely this combination that Crutchfield
achieves, with no exceptions in a long series of
fascinating prints, drawings and watercolours
executed during the past seven or eight years
and more recently in several sculptures.
Crutchfield was born in Indianapolis in 1932.
He attended John Herron School of Art where
he received his BFA degree in 1956. Upon
graduation, he won the Mary Milliken Award
for Travel in Europe. Later he attended Tulane
University, where in i 96o he took the MFA.
In the same year, Crutchfield won a Fulbright
Scholarship for study at the State Art Academy,
Hamburg, Germany. On his return to the United
States, he served first as instructor of drawing,
painting and design at the Herron School of
Art from 1963-65, and thereafter as an assistant
professor and chairman of Foundation Studies
at the Minneapolis School of Art from 1965 to
1967, after which time he settled in Los Angeles.
His output since then has been sizeable, his
accomplishments are widely acknowledged and
include about fifty published editions, as well
as more than sixty finished watercolours and
drawings. During the past year, he has
embarked upon creating three-dimensional
sculptures. The most important of these is a
giant three-ton Alphabet Spire, currently under
construction and scheduled to be erected late
in 1974 in West Hartford, Connecticut. This
work will stand 32 feet high and will be
constructed of laminated Malaysian mahogany
reinforced with welded aluminium and
bearing black anodized aluminium handles and
bolts.'
Although Crutchfield is a technical virtuoso,
it is clear that he never loses himself in
technique per se, for his interest is more in mood,
feeling and irony than in technical detail.
His compositions are clear and visually direct.
Most of his works include a single object or a
tightly grouped cluster of objects, sharply
focused and compositionally centred. The rest
is setting and enveloping space. Eucalyptus I
and the recent screenprint Swing and Tilt II
are typical examples. Burning Mining Town
from the Vistas suite is an exception. There, the
forms stretch diagonally across the wide format
and in themselves are little more than tiny
pictographs, drawn with just enough detail to
make each object in the composition believable
and convincing. This particular work has the
added distinction of having been inspired by the
burning of an actual town, Crested Butte,
Colorado, which was destroyed by fire in 1883.
Another departure from his customary
compositional scheme is Observation Point, a
regatta-like performance of scattered hybrid

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