DVAA Member since 2025
Donald Crowl
About:
Pennsylvania native, Donald Crowl, was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Carlisle. During his youth, he spent weekends in the rural Pennsylvania countryside for visits with his father, where his strong interest in gardening and landscape formulated his ideas of nature, place and identity. Donald developed an early aptitude for art. After graduating from high school, he attended Messiah College, changed his major to fine arts, and began to thrive in a small but influential art department. This was a transformative time, where classmates created a strong community through drawing and painting clubs, as well as visits to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Post college, Donald lived in Washington, DC, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and developed a career integrating his art and marketing skills in the not-for-profit and marketing sectors. His career included work at the International Sculpture Center, Scott Hanson Gallery, and The American Diabetes Association, as well as the publications Art & Auction, International Design, The Advocate, and America Online. In the early 2000s, he created some works on paper, studying with William Christenberry at the Corcoran School of Art, with modest success showing and selling his artwork in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Over the next 20 years, he took a hiatus from creating art both professionally and personally. With encouragement from friends, he returned to his creative practice in 2019 and started to exhibit and sell his work in 2024 in Lancaster, PA, where he currently resides. Lancaster re-ignites the influence of nature and place as identity in his works of art. Donald’s work is in collections throughout the United States.
Artist Statement:
Donald was born in Philadelphia, raised in south-central Pennsylvania and currently resides in Lancaster. Growing up in rural spaces, nature had a central role in his life and artwork. As part of his practice, he integrates painting and sculpture with everyday materials and traditional medium. His work is a response to the past, present and future preservation of these rural spaces. Donald begins his creative process with direct observation sketches, then develops images by using vivid colors, found objects and playful interpretations centered around meditation, memory and the passage of time. Donald invites the viewer to a new way of seeing, where color, texture and materials take precedence over realistic representation and offer a new way of experiencing our rural environments.
