Keith Crown

Crown was born May 27, 1918, in Keokuk, Iowa. His parents were Keith A. Crown Sr. and Cora Crown. He grew up in Gary, Ind., and he earned a bachelor’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a regimental artist with the U.S. Army, serving 45 months in the South Pacific from 1941 to 1945. He was awarded a Bronze Star, became a staff sergeant and provided combat-area illustrations for Yank magazine. Much of his wartime artwork is in a collection at Brown University.

In the years Crown taught at USC, coastal scenes in oils, caseins and watercolors dominated his work. The Pacific Ocean gave him themes of dynamic nature, as well as memories of war comrades who did not return. Sabbaticals and summers away from Los Angeles, in places such as New Mexico, Illinois and England, yielded paintings inspired by diverse settings.

Everywhere he painted, Crown worked on site outdoors for direct visual inspiration, maintaining that commitment even when watercolor froze as he worked. He built a home in Taos, N.M., in 1974 and spent parts of about 20 years painting there. Landscapes in Missouri — such as fields reminiscent of the sea — became a frequent subject after he moved to Columbia in the mid-1980s.

https://news.usc.edu/30162/In-Memoriam-Keith-Crown-91/