Crouse was committed to figurative painting, specialising in oil on canvas, from her early student years. She did large Photorealist paintings of the birth of her daughter as a fourth-year student. At the time feminism had not yet been addressed in South Africa in painting. Her later acceptance at St. Martins School of Art in 1979 was due to these and subsequent large Photorealist works which she did at Michaelis School of Art while doing her master’s degree. The content of these works explored motherhood. These works were seen as technically accomplished, dealing with universal, non-didactic, non-political themes, addressing subject matter around birth, aging and motherhood in a bold and unsentimental feminist vein. Crouse's initial feminist response was intuitive, a kind of inspection by a bird of its own feathers in search of comment on the state of birds, as apposed to that of the ornithologist, navigating from the outside in, to consolidate an academic report.
After ten years of study, she started her career in 1982 by doing a series of non-commissioned portraits of well-known South Africans, an expression of the zeitgeist of the country in the last years of Apartheid. Exhibiting these works led to commissions, fulfilling her ambition to become a court painter of sorts. She became the leading official portrait painter in the country towards the end of the ‘80s, cognisant that at that time oil painting on canvas, having been replaced by multifarious forms of expression, was regarded as anachronistic. Crouse was content to be unfashionable in pursuit of her fascination with and belief in the relevance of a centuries old Western preoccupation with the human form as subject in figurative painting.
Interspersed with commissions, she embarked on a project to do a series of contemporary religious icons depicting the Madonna and Child, a response to her exposure to the Renaissance at the end of her third year of study. Using her children as models, her focus is on the common humanity, as opposed to the divine, of the holy couple, as seen through the lens of her own experience of motherhood. These, along with the bulk of her work in her private collection, self-portraits and other works exploring avenues of interest, have been shown along with borrowed commissioned portraits at various mid-life retrospectives throughout the country in provincial state galleries.
Central to Crouse’s thinking, from the onset, is her awareness of gender, a woman competing in what for centuries was a male dominated domain. In the last decade, Crouse has addressed this in a book exploring her life as a painter, which she intends to publish. In this time her work has taken a new direction, an expression of ideas confronting the human condition, gender issues and sexuality. These works have not yet been exhibited.