Reflections

Catalogue of the Paintings and Writings of Artist, Alf Crossley

Exhibition September 26 – October 9, 2008
Kootenay Gallery of Art, History and Science
Castlegar, British Columbia, Canada

Misty Morning, Slocan Lake; Oil on Canvas, en plein air.

Since the 1970’s, Alf Crossley has painted En Plein Air throughout the Kootenays and western Canada.

His paintings and drawings incline toward abstract expressionism but have no direct antecedents. Impressionism, perhaps closest to Sisley or Pisarro, is indicated with flecks of transient light and colours which seem to gently flicker before the eyes; Post-impressionism, especially along the line of Cézanne, is inferred from object surfaces that break into planes of colour, but Crossley departs from all but the loosest assimilation of form: the shoulder of an unknown mountain, the line of a shore, the patterns of bird tracks or of branches and leaves. The imprint of American Expressionism through De Koonig and Gorky sometimes emerges in his bold lines and vibrant colours, yet Crossley does not remove natural representation entirely: a mountain is usually identifiable as a mountain; the reflection of a cloud-filled sky in water is the image of what it appears to be. Even his forays into pure abstraction always present some form of horizon, some connection to the natural world to root the viewer within physical reality. Some similarities are shared with another Canadian abstract-expressionist landscape painter, Paul-Émile Borduas, especially with the use of thick impasto, or the occasional almost geometrical arrangements of saturated colour, or in other renditions, the spare, almost Japanese style of airy arrangements that emerge in Tony Onley’s scenes of ocean beaches.

Of all the artists who connected him most closely to his own inspiration, Crossley writes, “I can’t help have a touch of [Jack] Shadbolt, who himself was strongly influenced by Graham Sutherland, Picasso and various hard-edge painters, and, of course, west coast native art forms. His life and art were strong expressions of the interface between these two worlds. From his home on Capital Hill, one could see from his studio windows, the human world’s massive stranglehold on west coast natural forms; they, themselves, having powerful visual elements.”

 Slocan Valley from Wilson Lake, Alf Crossley, Oil on Canvas.

A person hiking through a particular spot Crossley has painted in the natural landscape might recognize the scene, but within the painting or drawing, the scene retains its mysteries and is distinctly not a landmark—not chosen for a commemorative quality beyond its inherent nature. Even the natural beauty of the forms—and, yes, they are beautiful—are sublimated because they exist, not because they stand out as ideal forms, god-like and unreachable. Yet, through Crossley’s technique, they become archetypal, like images glimpsed in dreams.

In many paintings, Crossley also uses a watercolour style where oils are diluted with solvents or water. Colours merge into each other, verging on colour fields, but moving back into representation, as though the objectified mind moves into an unfocused dream state, then back into linear objectification. By playing and intertwining the two forms of perception—awakened state to dream, all-encompassing vision to the discriminate placement of marks—from one to the other, a third archetypal perception comes into play.

Setting is an essential component of Alf’s art, since so many of the places he paints have disappeared. He has lived in or near the Kootenays almost all of his life, traveling outside of it to experience new landscapes and settings from time to time, yet always returning, always re-immersing himself. So it is with his art. The styles change subtly as he develops and adds visual elements, but they are rhythmic and cyclical, returning to basic themes rooted in his own nature and reflected in nature around him.

Crossley begins and brings his work up to a certain stage in one natural setting, sometimes finishing it there. He will also finish pieces in a completely different environment, either in another natural scene, or his studio, particularly with the drawings. The pieces, themselves, are never finished per se—even when the art is cohesive, whole and “finished” in terms of its design elements—because they are wound together with a land that constantly changes and evolves, just as he does. This brings up another unshakeable component in Crossley’s work, the creative process itself.

His writings describe the setting where he lives and frequently works thusly:

“My studio overlooks a few acres of wild meadow where I hut hay for mulch. There is a wonderful display of wild grasses, osier dogwoods, hawthorn, rosebushes, thistles, golden rod and buttercups.”

April, 2008.

Alf’s studio is in a renovated 100-year-old former Doukhobor Communal Home in Pass Creek Valley where Alf lives, a tributary of the Columbia River Valley next to where he was born (1941) and raised in Rossland, BC. “I was visiting my brother, who lives in a similar Doukhabor community home across the road. From there, I saw this place for the first time, dark and mysterious in the distance. When I walked by it, I thought what a marvelous studio it would make, in spite of its sagging porch roof, missing windows and decayed roof. So I bought it.”

Inside, paintings and drawings cover every surface. His studio occupies the entire space upstairs. Wide windows open to the south and west where the Valley suddenly spreads, just at the crest where the water flow divides, Norn Creek into Pass Creek westward to the Columbia, and Goose Creek eastward to the Slocan River. It is a bright, expansive view, with more hours of sunlight exposure than most Kootenay valleys, and a patchwork of hobby farms.

“Farms and gardens are about the extent of forgiveness I have for human intervention on the land. There is a marked difference between them and the other ways in which mankind imposes itself over nature, with its concrete, asphalt, and cutblocks. You can see it with subdivisions: the first thing they do is go in and scrape everything off.” Alf reflects, “All the trees, all the topsoil, everything goes. There’s nothing left.”

Not much is left of the original wild or of its farm production period. At one time, the valley was covered with gardens, orchards and berries. Fields have mostly reverted to the wild, to the scene he described with its tangle of bushes, wildflowers and feral plants, but it isn’t the original wild of cedar rainforests and wetlands from the era of David Thompson.

“There’s still some old blackcurrant bushes left in the back. I’ve grown a garden ever since I was 13-years-old. I like to grow some of my own food. Farms are living and growing spaces, a totally different sort of energy. Nature and growing things mean something to me. It’s something I can connect with, something I can connect to.

“One of my favourite visuals is in the Okanagan Valley, where the orchards are laid out in rows, but they hug and follow the curves and hollows of the land, so you get these interesting effects with perspective and foreshortening.”

One style of drawing has emerged from those patterns. Sharp, parallel lines arranged in concave dips and hollow, or convex hills and mounds, in which irregular crosses or circles appear in rhythmic patterns, like distinct plants or trees in a garden. In the 1980s, Alf worked with batik where patterns evoked aboriginal Australian or African art, yet were personal and integral to him. Centuries of experiences drawn in the collective awareness of tribal imagery emerged in Crossley’s singular intuitive response to what he saw in the fields, hills and forests around him.

Although Alf is acutely aware of global circumstances which impact not only on the environment, and through extension, on almost every current facet of life, and marshals his abilities to record that disappearing world, he isn’t enmeshed in politics, marketing, or advocacy. He is outdoors and active, making art.

Alf’s direction in life wasn’t so much changed as refined by Bob Borsos, his senior high school art teacher. Borsos fled communism during the Hungarian uprising in 1956, landed in Australia for a brief period, and settled down to teach art in Rossland, B.C. The teacher had the full European-trained gamut of skills in painting, drawing, pottery, composition, and graphics, which he passed along to his students, but Alf says that it was his enthusiasm and love for art which inspired and led him to the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. There, he studied under such notables as Jack Shadbolt, Roy Kiyooka, Takao Tanabe, Bob Steele, Reg Holmes, Don Jarvis, and Lewis Mumford.

“The art school was a very pure painting and drawing institution with some of the most notable west coast artists of the time as instructors.”

April, 2008.

In Vancouver, it was easier for Alf to make his living and the nice climate and surrounding green areas were such that he never would’ve left the city, but for one thing, “I felt so out of control in that unnatural environment. I felt insecure about not being able to grow my own food. I could make my living easily, but I depended on other sources for what I ate. There was too much smoke, and above all else, the automobile congesting the air and the earth, a relentless dictator, devastating natural form. I was disconnected from nature and ungrounded.”

“Around the age of 13, to earn a Boy Scout gardener’s badge, I was allotted a section of the garden by my father to plant broad beans. Except for a year here and there in the rare times I didn’t plant a garden, I have grown them ever since. Whenever the place I was renting or caretaking had some ground attached to it, I broke the sod and planted: Vancouver, Burnaby, the Okanagan, and finally, Pass Creek.”

April, 2008.

Nature, being natural, the respect and appreciation for nature, and a wholesome integration with nature, all of these things inspire Crossley’s drawings and paintings.

At a time when the doctrine of modernism separated art from any narrative, adhering exclusively to dialogues about form and colour, Alf has remained true to the importance of process in the creation of his work. This is not to say that the importance of form and colour are diminished, but that the stories of how he draws and paints and why he draws and paints are intrinsic to the compositions. They are, in fact, visually obvious at first glance, very much part of the work.

“It starts with choosing the right spot,” Alf explains. “I’m up and out the door by seven or eight in the morning three or four days a week, no matter what. I take a drive and decide what I want to draw and paint, the scene and setting.”

In one particular theme or style which emerges from his enormous body of work, the fjord-like landscapes of lakes and mountains so common to the Kootenay area, it becomes apparent from Crossley’s use of perspective how high he sometimes climbs onto peaks to survey the land. There is a physical feat involved in choosing the setting for en plein air.

Mountains and benchlands loom large, the most distant rendered with a masterful sweep of the oil-laden brush, then broken down with solvent so that the canvas bleeds through, evoking mist or clouds. The next sweep introduces another hue, again lightened with solvent to generate the luminous effect of watercolour and to bleed the two colours together until they merge synchronously, their values perfectly matched, but the change heralded by a shift in warmth. The new colour deepens the sense of shape and creates the illusion of dimension. A heavier brush might introduce a series of single marks, lines or single-stroke shapes, both against the mountain and in the sky so that the very atmosphere reflects the colours below it, creating an impression of ravines and watersheds. This paint is thicker and the surface opaque.

“Like watercolour, the whites are often open canvas,” Alf explains, although not á la prima, not untreated canvas.

Similarly, the benchlands and hills rendered to the sides of the painting become stronger, more saturated and less translucent as shapes move into the foreground, adding warmth and playing at rocks exposed at the waterline or upon cliff-faces. The lower half of the canvas is a pale wash of golden light with flecks of orange and red where the surface of the reflective lake or river appears in the foreground, except for a single white irregular angle where a mountain juts into the lake, for instance, rendered entirely through the use of negative space. On the side, small calligraphic swirls of the brush depict trees here and there, the ones that stuck out from the others in the forest. Unpainted canvas comes out in the form of lines, the shoreline, glimmers of light which outline a tree or rock, the line of cloud shredding itself against a mountainside at a certain height.

Slocan Lake from Wilson Creek Delta; Oil on Canvas, en plein air.

This particular style of Crossley’s is very soft and atmospheric. It reveals so much detail about the scene—the shape of the mountains, the play of elements that day, “found” colours and others from a more inner impression of experience—but all accomplished with as little human intervention as possible. The marks are minimal, but deliberate, chosen for a lasting impact, whether through calligraphy, or washed out, or thickly applied with a palette knife, or overpainted in solid hues, or left as bare canvas.

The paintings depict spontaneity balanced and tempered with that educated discrimination. At an earlier point in his career, Alf wrote:

“I like to locate myself in different environments and experience the conscious and subconscious response to the stimulation. The work is an attempt to blend the worlds of the conscious and the intuitive.

“I put the drawings aside, usually not referring to them, and commence painting. (All my gear is set up beforehand.) I don’t know ahead of time what the image will be until the brush starts across the canvas. The form grows without forcing.”

When this earlier reference is pointed out to him, Alf laughs, “Except, sometimes, the form needs to be forced. There is a fine line between chaos and art, with the only thing keeping it from tipping over being experience.”

The result of this care and discrimination, however, is that the viewer also experiences the scene both intuitively and consciously.

After Alf decides upon the location of his day’s work, he takes time to prepare it carefully so that he isn’t interrupted or overly hampered by changes in temperature or precipitation.

“After I choose my spot, taking into account the amount of light, the exposure, the amount of room I have to move around, I set up my space. Usually I have a table and an easel. I will cover the surface with an umbrella or a tarp. I need lots of room to move around, about 30 – 40 feet around me, so I will clear away fallen logs and twigs. I will even sweep the ground and maybe even lay down a bit of carpet. I want to be able to get back quite far and look at the painting from a distance, then move in quickly while the decision is still fresh in my mind as to what needs to be done next.”

“Spontaneity in the moment. Haiku in paint.

“Often, by chance, I find a place out of the wind on a cold day, in the shade of summer, a relatively benevolent environment and by the ways of serendipity, also a place of wonder and beauty. I have a few moments or hours before the elements get too cold, too dark, or too hot to try to complete a spontaneous, unpremeditated painting. With hardly more than luck and more than 40 years of painting experience, the effort comes to fruition.

“So what if the form at times in the end seems awkward when completed almost desperately under conditions, perhaps, such as fatigue, cold, intense heat and glare, cramped in awkward spots. Suddenly, the brilliant summer sun has found me despite my early morning start and careful calculations how the sun will travel, eventually finding my shady bower despite my best efforts. The painting will just not let me go, not quite there although the glare and heat are rapidly becoming unendurable.

“Or the day starts as benignly perfect for painting the view, the weather, my mood all aligned — then the day changes. A cold breeze springs up changing my mood and colour, my body is cramped. I need a good stretch but there isn’t time.”

27^th January, 2008.

“I dress in a lot of layers. I will paint with my gloves on all year round as I use toxic substances. I’m such a tall, lanky fellow, the extra weight and layers don’t impede me. If the weather is good, I’ll take it all off. I like to paint barefoot, to be as close to the feeling of nature as possible.”

Sometimes, Alf will take a complete break from creating visual art and write in his journal or play music instead. First of all, he carefully records anything which seems noteworthy. Locations, dates, and environmental conditions are marked on the back of drawings, but he also writes about his inner process, in philosophical prose or stanzas of poetry. Nor is Music just a hobby, but a necessity, especially in the winter when night falls early and it gets too dark to paint. The movement into words and objectified meaning, or music and pure emotional expression provide relief and counterpoints to the exhaustive effort of seeing and watching and deciding, the acute focus on the visual lay of the land to which Alf would otherwise be attuned.

In this manner, Alf is always creating, always expressing his unique view of the land, and of his particular time and place. These are instrumental, not as a form of protest, but as an acknowledgment of the landscape’s utter uniqueness, something which will soon disappear, possibly forever.

“I’m the only guy who has ever painted most of the watersheds and creeks and river sources around here,” he explains. “I was the first, and I will probably be the last. No one else can accomplish this since most of these places are disappearing. Some of them are already gone.”

“Once I discover a place that has all the qualities of a good painting spot, I tend to return to it to paint. So, one step ahead of the bulldozer, I keep on the lookout for good locations before they are destroyed by the heavy imprint of mankind. Often these little sanctuaries are eventually blocked off, I suppose because of vandalism or the dumping of garbage. How a person can dump rude human waste over moss-covered bedrock or down into a sparkling, pristine hillside stream is beyond my understanding, though I do have a few clues … I suppose if I lived my life the way they do theirs, I would be doing the same.

“There is nothing like the deluxe early hours of a fine, summer day, the location well-established, shade when I need it, the ground underfoot smooth and cool for bare feet when the day grows warmer, the dappled light, a warm, soft breeze, bird song, a stream nearby or lapping water nearly at my feet. Much to celebrate!”

6^th February, 2008.

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Another variation of Alf’s style is completely abstracted so that any resemblance to objects in nature can no longer be easily inferred. The imagery of objects and things has moved almost completely into the abstracted impressions of the intuitive mind. Positive and negative spaces are pulled out all at once. This usually involves opaque swathes of overpainting, for example, in soft greys or whites, to cover translucent brushmarks of bright jewel-like colour and sometimes drybrush calligraphic lines for the markings of bird tracks in the snow or sand, or the segments of an insect’s body. Sometimes, it is simply opaque markings of paint over washes of lighter colour. In these canvasses, shapes erupt from the abrupt shifts in value like stones jutting out of a snowy field or brightly coloured fallen leaves on soft grey sand.

Abstract-expressionist, Jack Shadbolt honed onto the sweeping brushstrokes in Alf’s work, in a critique written in 1981:

“It takes command of the space well and easily. It’s handled with the absolute deft economy of the brush and, for that reason, it carries and real sense of quiet, strong conviction about it as a sort of sketch/painting which holds itself complete. It’s the kind of thing that the Chinese masters did and worked on till they mastered this deftness over and over and over again.”

The Vancouver Art School was next to Vancouver’s Chinatown, and Alf frequently found himself in those shops looking over the inks and quill nibs, the various qualities of calligraphy paper. Calligraphy plays a strong role in the paintings themselves, with the Chinese treatment of brushstrokes applied thick or thin, even washing out completely. A strong influence shows up with the actual use of quill-pens and Chinese inks in his earliest drawings and in the intricately patterned batiks.

Later on, Alf shifted to graphite stick drawings on stiff paper, completely different in execution and appearance to the intricately patterned pen-and-ink work. Erasure “take-away” provide soft, misty quality very similar to the paintings in which reflections within the water are called out by translucent washes of oil colour. Layers of dark graphite are like the opaque shapes of colour placed with a thick brush or a palette knife in those same paintings, except for that there is no variation in colour, just in value. So Alf captures a range of mountains as they curve around a lakeshore to grow smaller in the distance, or a windswept field of snow, or clouds sculpted by the wind into horizontal bands.

A third type of drawing intersperses quick spidery lines with solid shapes of graphite. Although there is an informal quality to the appearance, no mark is casual. Everything is precise and controlled, born of experience and discretion. These are the aspen poplar forest images, where lines indicate the vertical lift of tree trunks and grasses, and solid shapes give birth to leaves, knotholes, or stones scattered across the ground.

“In the winter of 1966-67, I spent a semester at the art school in Gloucester, England. It is a very picturesque part of the Midlands, the Cotswolds—lots of river valleys, farms and forests. I also found the architecture to be very inspiring, especially the Romanesque arches. The forms were very natural. When I came back to western Canada, I saw those same shapes in the trees.”

Thicket and forest paintings use vertical lines to evoke rising trunks. Sometimes, the trunks are left as unpainted canvas, apart from a few small strokes here and there to indicate knotholes or dark, calligraphic branches, so that it is only the negative space which is painted. The colour in these landscapes is usually warmer and more vivid to reflect the interplay of sunlight on leaves. Palette-knife applied oranges, yellows, bright reds, pinks and violets play with cooler lavenders, purples and greens. The paintings are bright and exuberant. Again, washes of solvents will cause certain areas of colour to bleed into each other. Sometimes, the paintings become almost completely abstracted, like stained glass windows — allusions to Gothic architecture, and the melding of natural landscape with human invention.

Each of the different styles submerge and re-emerge at different periods of his life. He returns to different themes, even different paintings after letting them sit for months, even years, when he has something new to mark down, some different way of seeing that scene. Nothing is can ever really be finished until life is over, although all the works he releases have reached a cohesive and complete state. In this respect, he has a similar philosophy, although a very different style, to contemporary artist, Ann Kipling:

“I am shedding preconceived notions of what things are like, and accept the transience of appearances — that things “are” and “become.” Form for me does not of necessity describe objects in themselves but reveals more the chimera of nature.”

Ann Kipling, quoted by Ian Thom, Recent Landscapes,

Art Gallery of Victoria, 1979.

Crossley spent some weeks as an artist-in-residence at the Leighton Center in Priddis, just southwest of Calgary, in the aspen and pine forests of the foothills, interspersed with drives into the woodlands of Saskatchewan. The big skies of that region and the movement of its aspen forests are well-loved by Alf. The desert colours and orchard patterns, the warm lakes, and eroded mountains of the Okanagan feature in other series of works. Most of all, it is the Kootenays which feature in his work. Everywhere there is a natural environment, he finds something to glorify in painting and drawings.

Studio Visits and Interviews: Wednesday, 7^th and 14^th of February, 15^th July, 2008; McDaniels Rd., Pass Creek, BC

Interview: Wednesday, 2^nd April, 2008, Skiboff Rd., South Slocan, BC, with written work extrapolated from his personal journals and clippings files, catalogues of contemporary artists and a transcribed portion of a CBC archived interview.

Photographs taken directly from The Whatever Gallery, Alf Crossley’s Public Website at alfcrossley.ca

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