Small Stuff: Warren Criswell's Paintings

Most of these paintings are oil sketches I made from 1997 to 1999. They're on small pieces of plywood or copper, oil on acrylic grounds. The sketches look like a distinctly different style from my larger paintings - hastily brushed with too-large brushes, not much attention to detail, images in their embryonic stage. But actually, this is what most of my paintings look like in their early stages, the underpainting stage, before I get down to the glazing and scumbling and whatever it takes to finish them. But I like the raw look of these little guys and the strangely connected narratives they seem to be trying to tell, so I decided to hang them up on in this Saatchi Gallery wall.