what do they want ... all these women?
“Little Affinities” is a series of small pictures that are developed here after the first group of “Affinities”, now in a small format, 18 x 24 cm and also 20 x 24 cm.
I dedicate this series of works to my father, a researching zoologist and great lover of the animal world. With him I learned to like animals and to share my reality with them. In my childhood I lived this closeness to animals through him, some rare ones like a pangolin, or Pholidota, who lived in the garden for a while.
This series was partially painted with the help of a magnifying glass as some details are tiny. For this reason, too, the brushstrokes are thick. At the moment the series consists of 10 pictures. The painting surface is canvas on cardboard. The pictures are signed and dated on the back.
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 180 mm x 240 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
Since 2018 I have been working on a cycle of paintings that picks up the current Diaspora displaced peoples.
Based on the idea of departure, this cycle bears the title
I pack my suitcase and take ...
The title of each individual picture fills this gap:
I pack my suitcase and take ... the dignity, ... nothing but ruins, ... the silence, etc. with me.
This cycle currently consists of 13 large-format oil paintings, 150 cm x 125 cm. The technique is experimental and combines complex abstract backgrounds with a very precise figurative painting based on the art of drawing. The atmosphere is poetic and nebulous. The common denominator is walking and the burden. When exhibited side by side, the pictures look like a march.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
The painting technique is also experimental here and combines complex abstract backgrounds with very precise figurative painting. Delicate areas of light and color divide the picture. The daughter wants to move on. The front is red. The mother resists and looks back. She is pulled. The daughter wins.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
An old lady walks forward proudly and straight in slow steps. The eyes are closed. She is carrying a suitcase. Both the suitcase and the body disappear and blend with the environment. A light shadow seems to hurry away and lead the way. Everything is red, bubbles and fire and gases. A man, blue-turquoise, marches out of the picture in front of her.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
As in an underwater world, the traveller pulls forward, his eyes drawn to the light. An indefinable material shadow, like a whirlwind or a volcano, divides the earth. Behind it is a misty, glowing world. He wants to go there.
2020 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
An old man carries a suitcase and moves forward, bent but resolute. Two women, who are also carrying suitcases, hurry in the same direction. One of them holds out her hand to the unknown. The other one runs fast. We don't see her face. The scenario is a deep glowing dark blue night. A blue billy goat sits in their way. Opposite them stands a huge woman like a wall: a guard.
2019 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
A girl travels. Your step is dynamic and resolute. A translucent light breaks the red-yellow and blue stripes of the earth in turmoil. But the sun comes with her. It hangs on the tip of a stick and is shaped like a balloon, a toy.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
Where is down Where is up? Everything looks like a huge, dense, heavy cloud that rips open in the middle and pours out a mighty waterfall. Like a slimy cloak, the sky forms the contours of the ruins, the contours of the narrow suitcase, the contours of the head of the man who, naked, turns his back on us and walks away.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
The march is arduous. Both women are pregnant. The atmosphere is dense and hot and strange. They are steps over gaseous matter. The rust colour of the picture is broken here and there. Above in blue, a very reduced hint of sky. In the middle a wide yellow stripe crosses the horizon. Below, a rosy formation rises from the ground, reminiscent of an amniotic sac.
2020 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
Here is a bouquet of women, horses and roses pulled by a man. A sea of red carries this scenery.
2018 oil on canvas, 125 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
It is a large-format picture, with oil on canvas, first painted experimentally, wildly and abstractly, then increasingly concretized in precise figures and landscapes. The picture shows a traveling woman with a child tied to her chest. She looks into the distance while a tough and heavy sky pours over the earth. It is quiet. She rests.
"We soon become aware of a female outlook that challenges the viewer, provoking questions and holding certain conceptions of modernity, or of „so-called modern“ painting up for scrutiny. Her passage to artistic maturity is achieved through a dichotomous imagination, personal and collective, that serve as a buffer against the troubles of the modern world and allow us to review her short but nonetheless past artistic career while providing continuity to her path of liberation."
José Berardo, President of the Berardo Collection
from the preface to the catalogue A Mãe das Mães, 2008
2008, oil on canvas, 150 x 160 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, oil on canvas, 160 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2008, oil on canvas, 150 x 160 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2008, oil on canvas, 150 x 160 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
"(...) The truth is that I do not know what statements my pictures contain. Maybe each of them is just only another creature. I do not ask about their sense of being, just as I do not ask about the sense of being of a flamingo or a cactus. I make "things" out of unclear ideas."
Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
( from the interview /Urban Riche Gallery, 2016)
2013, oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2014, oil on canvas, 80 x 100 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2010, graphite and crayon on paper, 42 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2010, oil on canvas, 120 x 140 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2003, dull acrylic on canvas, 232 x 200 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2007, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2015, graphite on paper, 48 x 36 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
Associating and concretising characterise the works of Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral. The process of finding the final picture is determined by random elements – scars on the picture object, colour structures, imprints of the body. Cabral develops poetically surreal paintings from these unspecified circumstances, which remain puzzling in spite of their vividness. They are like a narrative kaleidoscope, which generates uncountable views without decoding the presentation (...)
Dr. Sabine Weicherding,
September 2012 ( from the preamble - Associations and concretising -)
2013, pigment and oil on canvas, 70 x 100 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2013, pigment and oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2007, acrylic, pigment, graphite and oil on canvas, 90 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2010, oil on canvas, 180 x 160 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2013, pigment and oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
"Modern Madonna hides bizarre animals in her arms, and meets the gaze of the viewer confidently, sometimes searchingly.
Beauty and aggressiveness come together in this universe, inherently it becomes increasingly independent. "
Dr. Sabine Weicherding (from the preface to the catalogue "The Dortmunder group dialog" 2014)
2012, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2015, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2014, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
„ The adult male figure is therefore partially omitted in Maria Teresa's works, and if any allusion to it can be discerned other thanin blurry backgrounds, this is due to the appearance of pregnant women and in rare cases of children. These women seem to have become pregnant on their own, in certain situations the man may seems to have been replaced by animals of markedly male symbology, such as cockerels or bulls. In other cases, however, some animals also possess a female symbology, such as elegant but agressive herons in flight.“
Dr. Rui Carita, from the catalogue A Mãe das Mães, 2008
2013, oil on canvas, 140 x 105 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2003, dull acrylic on canvas, 243,5 x 201,5 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2001, dull acrylic on canvas, 219,5 x 213 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, pigment, acrylic ang graphite on canvas, 160 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2007, mixed media and oil on canvas, 99,2 x 68,5 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, mixed media and oil on canvas, 60 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2015, graphite on paper, 48 x 36 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
what do they want ... all these women?
2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2013, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, Oil on Silk, 1350 mmx 1000 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, oil on canvas, 800 mm x 500 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2018, oil on canvas, 550 mm x 700 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2020, oil on canvas, 600 mm x 800 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, oil on canvas, 600 mm x 800 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, oil on canvas, 400 mm x 300 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, oil on canvas, 600 mm x 400 mm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
"The White Pictures: this series, which is thought to be as yet unfinished, is united by the fact that each picture tells a pared-down story. The works say what gives them the title - in some of them is just one word, like Mamã or Protest. Unlike almost of the other series, where the narrative is multifaceted, plural and ambiguos, here the representation is direct, pared to the minimum and clear, which may be why the pictures are white."
Dr. Rui Carita from the catalogue A Mãe das Mães, 2008.
2006, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2006, oil on canvas, 95 x 75,8 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2007, expermental mixed media with oil, on canvas, 98,5 x 96,3 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2006, oil on canvas, 80,5 x 73,5 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2006, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2007, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
"(...) The truth is that I do not know what statements my pictures contain. Maybe each of them is just only another creature. I do not ask about their sense of being, just as I do not ask about the sense of being of a flamingo or a cactus. I make "things" out of unclear ideas."
Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
( from the interview /Urban Riche Gallery, 2016)
2010, mixed media and oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2010, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2004, oil on canvas, 206,5 x 200 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2005, oil on canvas, 2014 x 207 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2001, dull acrylic on canvas, 206 x 180 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2015, graphite on paper, 43 x 30 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2015, graphite on paper, 48 x 36 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2012, graphite on paper, 42 x 29,5 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
„ (…) The chronological sequence that I was shown offered me a look into an early experimental abstract phase and ended with the complex series entitled Os treze Prétlonista (the Thirteen Pretlönists), in wihch the painting is cold, austere and charged with an extraordinary chromatic vibration. Starting a new phase in 2001, this promising artist set out to re-learn the processes of pictorial expression, re-utilising her capacity for figuration and exploring the possibilities of volume. Maria Teresa's admirable painting of human form celebrates explosive and somewhat paradoxical carnality, combined with an ever present subtlety of gesture and nudity.“
José Berardo, from the Preamble to the catalogue A Mãe das Mães, 2008.
2004, oil on canvas, 206,5 x 200 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
May 2003, Dull acrylic on canvas, 215 x 202 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2005, oil on canvas, 200,5 x 200, 1 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2005, oil on canvas, 207,5 x 152 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2002, dull acrylic on canvas, 200,5 x 179 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2003, dull acrylic on canvas, 232 x 200 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2001, dull acrylic on canvas, 249 x 204 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2001, dull acrylic on canvas, 261 x 200,5 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2005, oil on canvas, 214 x 204 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
dance with me
2017, oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, oil on canvas, 120 x 80 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, oil on canvas, 110 x 110 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, line drawing
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2011, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, line drawing
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2017, line drawing
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, line drawing
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, two Pictures for the exhibition Grey at the Big Gallery, Dortmund, and Galerie am Donhof, Zwickau, Germany. The feeling of anxiety and worry takes place. Rahmenbedingungen (conditions) and Inside-outside refer to our unsettling times: Barriers and divisions - I'm in it, but my hands are out.
2016, oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
2016, oil on canvas, 70 x 90 cm
© Maria Teresa Crawford Cabral
