Provenance:
Private Collection, New York, acquired at the exhibition below
Exhibited:
Killarney, Frank Lewis Gallery, West Cork: New Paintings by William Crozier, 1993.
William Crozier is an artist of the Irish diaspora, born in Glasgow of Irish parents. As a returned exile, however, he brings a uniquely intense vision to bear on his ancestral country: in his hands, the Irish landscape becomes a rich and fertile place, full of mystery, excitement and the dark potential of legend. The Road to the Shore is set near his adoptive home not far from Skibbereen in West Cork, and is a wonderful example of his work, with its characteristic vertiginous perspective, unifying diagonal emphasis and lush, potent palette.
Crozier enrolled at the Glasgow School of Art in 1949 and, after a spell in Paris, lived in Dublin from 1953-57 as a set-designer at the Olympia Theatre and the Theatre Royal. Following his return to London in 1957, he held his first one-man show at the Drian Galleries and began a fully-fledged career as a painter, spending long periods in Paris and Spain, teaching at Winchester School of Art and exhibiting variously at the ICA, Drian, Tooth, Serpentine, Scottish and Bruton Galleries. In 1983, however, he began to divide his time between Hampshire and a new home in Kilcoe, West Cork, and to focus increasingly on the landscape around Rosscarbery and Crosshaven for his inspiration. Crozier has said of the art of landscape painting: �Tell the truth. Say it simply�. The resulting works, however, have a kind of spiritual undercurrent which to me belies this bald summary: like Jack Yeats, he is unconsciously alive to the antique mysticism of Ireland and its landscape, and this resonates from his pictures.
The RHA and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork jointly organised a retrospective of Crozier�s work in 1991, and a major book on him is to be published by Lund Humphries this autumn.
