It’s safe to say that as long as there have been notebooks with margins in them, students have been doodling in them during class. From repetitive patterns to caricatures of our teachers to Batman – we all do it. Artist Christopher Crowder is no exception. Only his notebooks are more than just a little bit exceptional. Crowder, now in his last semester as a Bachelor of Fine Arts candidate at Wayne State University, fills page upon page in his notebook with intensely intricate images of a fantastical and more than just a little bit disturbing world.

With clean line work, Crowder details the not so clean – the secret life of toasters, war machines and people turned into machines. There’s grotesque figures engaged in sex or perhaps violence and death, futuristic machines with accompanying alien hieroglyphics. All inhabitants that might be found in a futuristic “Plop” magazine crossed with Aeon Flux are the product of Crowder’s exotic imagination and quite eloquent execution.

Extraordinary stuff to be sure.

But there’s something else extraordinary about them. They aren’t his sketchbooks for drawing class. These are his notes from academic classes. Which isn’t to say that they’re the work of a constant daydreamer or represent a lack of paying attention in class. No – these ARE his notes. Each deconstructed body part, each organic machine-filled landscape is not simply an outlet for his imagination, but also serves as a memory cue, a pointer to a place in his biological database if you will, to the material covered in the lecture at the time. As a notebook filled with names, dates, and hastily scribbled shorthand is for most of us, the elements of the composition of this techno-Brueghel world are for Crowder. This might sound as odd as the pictures themselves, but it’s working, thank you very much, as Crowder is heading into his final term with high marks.

This is Crowder’s second time around as a college student. He attended the College for Creative Studies out of high school, but things didn’t work out then. He threw away his art supplies and started working in computers. In 1998 he married his wife Hanna, and now is a Senior Field Engineer in the computer technical field. But not drawing or painting for over a decade was killing him, yet at the same time he says he didn’t want to exhibit at church bazaars or some such fare. This desire to create reared its head first in the form of landscaping his yard with 250 bowling balls. This was a clear sign that something needed to be done! And so in 2001, at the age of 33, with strong support from his wife, he gave himself a second chance. He went back to school, with a new found desire and great discipline and self-sufficiency.

Back to school has meant an immersion into both fine arts classes as well as plenty of academic classes – hence the genesis of his notebook, which he’s been adding to semester by semester. And yes, it does happen that a professor who assumes that he’s been diligently taking notes in a more traditional sense sees the pages and is a bit perplexed, if not concerned. But he continues on unfazed, working in a way that makes sense from his own perspective, and doing well as a student. (Occasionally fellow students will ask to borrow his notebook, as they too see him working so intently on it. He tries to explain that they won’t be able to read it, and it’s only when they actually see its contents, that they understand and are often a bit frightened!)

Crowder never gave his “doodles” much serious thought until WSU drawing Professor Jeffrey Abt saw the notebook during a senior seminar class, and recognized their strength. He claims that Abt really took him to task to embrace the energy and imagination being put forth on those pages, as well as the process that they emerged from, and use that as the focus for his work, rather than the more traditional paintings he was creating for art school at the time. And so he began incorporating elements from and the flavor of the notebook into full drawings, and with the subsequent encouragement of painting Professor Adrian Hatfield, really started to work big and play with drawings in the larger format. This was a really exciting development for Crowder and has set him upon his current path which has gained him shows at the Detroit Artists Market, Ann Arbor’s Gallery Project (where he first caught our attention) and brought him critical attention. (See our review here.) Crowder’s currently in this week’s Dirty Show, and has upcoming exhibitions in Chicago and Dallas.

For Crowder, his notebooks are a way of really seeing through a concept, not just the outer surface. He compares his unique way of taking notes to what he learned from his anatomy Professor Russell Keeter at CCS the first time around – “you can’t just look at a person to draw them, you have to see the mechanisms within it.”

Crowder’s notebooks have not only helped him get through school but display the significance of “just” doodling. Look for more of his work around town and beyond, and keep doodling in your own notebooks – it might just reveal more than you think. - Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com