Douglass Crockwell was born in Ohio and was known as a highly competent and conscientious commercial illustrator. There is more known about his other career - as an avant-garde abstract animator. He began making films in 1931. His films include, Motion Painting No 1(1949) ; Glen Falls Sequence 1946 and Long Bodies (1947) Many of the images you see beneath are from this very period and it is a tribute to him that such meticulous technique was expending in two directions often thought to be mutually antagonistic - abstraction and figuration.

The date of his death is unknown but it was believed to be in the 1980's in Glen Falls NY where he had lived much of his life. See exhibition catalogue, film as film ACGB Hayward Gallery, London, 1979.

TOP ROW

 left -"Holiday Visitors" December 1950 This is one of his very best - and most hilarious revelation of American suburban life - a sort of Douglas Sirk feeling. Here's a man (looking like J.Edgar Hoover) who has been poking about with Art. Such a wealth of frames throughout.
 
right - "Showing Off the Flower Garden" August 1949 - "In this home -loving land of ours... in this America of kindliness, or friendship, of good humored tolerance..."

 

BOTTOM ROW (see also separate section)

left, crazy woman pouring for WELCH's

right -detail of how Crockwell uses flat patterning from another Welch's ad

 

In the New Gallery, I add scans from my teaching set of slides, Beer and Avondale.