From rubble to retrospective: New York artist rescues his paintings for Seattle show

On the morning of Sept. 11, artist Ford Crull was at work in his studio at 258 Broadway, just three blocks from the World Trade Center. The things he saw that morning and in the week that followed, working alongside firefighters and medics in the rescue mission, stunned him into a state of profound awareness. He compares it to what he remembers from the war movie, "All Quiet on the Western Front."

"It gets very hard to relate to normal things," he said. "The level of intensity is almost surreal. You get this kind of shocked calm."

During the week after the attack, Crull — sneaking onto the site with a hardhat and fake photo I.D. he contrived for himself — worked every day, into the early hours of the morning, helping in any way he could. "That gives you some idea of how chaotic it was," he said by cell phone from New York. "There was nobody really in charge."

At that point his building was cordoned off, so sometimes he'd walk back uptown late at night to sleep at his girlfriend's apartment. Dirty, exhausted and numb, he stopped off at a bar one night to have a beer. "Everybody was talking and laughing like nothing happened," he says.

Crull went to art school at the University of Washington and lived in Seattle during the 1970s and early '80s, showing his work at the Diane Gilson and Linda Farris galleries. Now a 25-year survey of his paintings is on display at the Friesen Gallery in downtown Seattle. Getting the paintings out of his studio and across the country after the Sept. 11 attacks took ingenuity, persistence and luck. Crull had to sneak back into his studio building at 258 Broadway and, with his artist pal Steve Kursh, load the paintings on a push cart and wheel them to Soho, where Kursh's van was parked. There was no air-freight service available, so Crull crossed his fingers and shipped them off by UPS ground service.

The works arrived at the Friesen Gallery at 4:30 p.m. Oct. 3 — just 24 hours before the exhibit opened. The shipment had been lost briefly near Cincinnati. Shaken, gallery owner Andria Friesen — who flew out of New York Sept. 10 from a visit to Crull's studio — still can't quite believe the show is up on the gallery walls. And, even more, that Crull made it to the opening, too. "He was beside himself for the time he was here," Friesen said.

Crull says he's been "very nervous, kind of antsy" since the attack. "I couldn't sit still for quite a while." That's why, on Sept. 11, after he'd been shuffled around the city for much of the day in the ensuing chaos, he wanted to get back to his neighborhood and do something to help. "I ended up going back to my place and got antsy there, so I went to give blood," he said. "Nobody wanted blood; at that point they weren't set up for it."

Then, when he tried to return to his studio, the area had been cordoned off and he had to talk his way back in, "by lying, actually," he admits.

Later that first night he went down to the site of the devastation and acted like he knew exactly what he was doing. They let him in.

"I was helping with the rubble bucket brigade and shoveling," he said. "I ended up mostly just working in the Med One unit — we supplied the main trauma unit — helping with supplies, helping people find things."

He also took photographs, at a time when members of the press were barred from the area, and made friends with firefighters and aid workers.

Crull ended up working on the rescue mission most of each day and night until Sunday. "That's when the Army came in and basically threw out the volunteers. Up till then, it was pretty loose."

Crull left Seattle for New York in 1983, figuring it was the only way he would make it as a painter.

"How many artists in Seattle do you know surviving on their work?" he says with a laugh. "If you want to swim with the sharks, you've gotta come to New York." During the '80s, with a super-heated art market and soaring prices, that made sense. "It was great," Crull admits. "We were all just making so much money it wasn't even funny. But things have changed."

His show at Friesen Gallery is a sample of work that Crull has held back for himself over the years. "It's work that I really loved. I had a lot of reticence about whether it should be for sale," he says. Crull has another show of more recent paintings opening at the Howard Scott Gallery in New York on Nov. 15. That work was completed before the events of Sept. 11. Since then, he's had a tough time getting back to work at his studio.

Part of that is for physical reasons: The building is in a restricted area, so access is difficult, and the air is still permeated with smoke. "It's been extremely hard to paint — very, very difficult," Crull says. He has completed one piece since the attacks, but doesn't yet know if it holds up. "I just took a tube of paint and drew," he says. And among the images, encrypted at the bottom of the painting he added the words, "all that matters."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com