Divine Opulence.

Byline: Dodie Kazanjian.

Meet Rosson Crowa flamboyant, Texas-born artist whose paintings of history-steeped interiors are as exuberant as their creator.

I'm very impatient," says Rosson Crow, whose bravura, oversize, history-drenched paintings have already caused something of a stir on two continents. She had her debut show when she was 21, at the Canada gallery in New York City in September 2004, the same month she entered Yale's graduate School of Art. She showed in Paris a year later; her work has since appeared at major galleries in Los Angeles and London; it was recently featured in a solo "Focus" exhibition at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth; and she's just joined Deitch Projects in Manhattan. Too much too soon? Not for Texas-born Crow, whose brimming confidence and brash, theatrical persona are as arresting as her art.

Crow's big, splashy, semiabstract pictures of Gilded Age interiors, Napoleon's bedroom, Wild West saloons and honky-tonk bars, and historical events such as Lincoln's funeral are devoid of people, like stage sets recalled in a fever dream. An amalgam of gestural, Abstract Expressionist brushwork, replete with copious drips, the paintings are so large and so enveloping that it's hard for the viewer to resist feeling drawn in. The effect is both real and unreal, something like the period rooms at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which Crow often visited when she was at the School of Visual Arts and now cites as a primary influence on her work.

Growing up in a suburb of Dallas, Crow couldn't decide whether she wanted to be a painter or an actress, so she combined the two. The daughter of a computer engineer and an interior designer who did "out of this world" decors for the private jets of the sultan of Brunei and other highfliers, Crow has always been an over-the-top show in herself. She wore Halloween outfits to school all year round, choosing from her collection of 35 wigs. For the opening of her 2008 show at Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, she appeared as a 1960s Las Vegas showgirlpink feather headdress and fishnet stockings, her statuesque figure squeezed into a sequined maillot with trailing plumes. "I want my pictures to have a certain bravado or brassiness," she tells ...