WILLIAM CROZIER:THE ARTIST, best known for his boldly coloured, strongly patterned landscape paintings, has died. Crozier became an Irish citizen in 1973 and from the early 1980s divided his time between homes and studios in Hampshire and at Kilcoe, Roaring Water Bay, in west Cork.
Ireland, particularly the distinctive west Cork landscape, was central to his artistic vision.
He was born in the Glasgow suburb of Coker on May 5th, 1930, to Irish parents, Robert and Flora Crozier from Ballinderry, Co Antrim. Robert worked as a plumber at a shipyard in Govan. When he became foreman in 1935, the family moved to Troon, a seaside town in Ayrshire, regularly visiting Ballinderry.
Crozier’s interest in art developed early, encouraged by Sir Alexander Walker, an art collector and the chairman of Marr College, the non-denominational school he attended. William Irvine, whom he’d met in junior school and who became a lifelong friend, shared his artistic interests and also became a painter. Impressed by a Picasso-Matisse exhibition, the pair visited Paris to see more while still in their teens. Van Gogh was to be another major influence, as, less predictably, was the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, “the greatest influence I ever had”.
Crozier hitchhiked around Ireland before enrolling in the Glasgow School of Art. While studying, he was much struck by the existentialist writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, befriended the distinguished older artist William Gear and met the celebrated two Roberts of contemporary Scottish art, MacBryde and Colquhoun, who later became friends when Crozier was part of the Soho art scene, following his graduation and a move to London.
Then he married the actress Elspeth McKail and they moved to Dublin. Their son, Paul, was born in 1955, and a daughter, Siobhán, in 1959. He and McKail separated in 1965. In Dublin, Crozier worked as a set painter for several theatres, including the Olympia, and mixed with the McDaids literary set, getting to know Anthony Cronin.
He returned to England in 1956 and a three-person show, with Irvine and John Wright, attracted favourable notice the following year. Crozier gained something of a reputation for making confrontational, daring works. His first solo show, at the Drian Gallery, proved controversial because of his abstracted portrait of Princess Margaret. By the end of the decade he had inherited William Scott’s teaching post at the Bath Academy of Art. His teaching career also encompassed a spell at the Central School of Art, London, and his tenure as head of fine art at Winchester School of Art until 1987.
Early in 1963 he travelled to Spain and stayed for a time with Anthony Cronin at La Corona, before renting a house at La Huerta del Chorro. Feeling increasingly isolated, he returned to London by year’s end. There is a tough, almost bleak quality to his paintings of the 1960s, his expressionist decade, comprising many landscapes but culminating in a “Skeleton” series following a visit to the former concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.
His work draws on a wealth of precedent and tradition, including the Scottish colourists, School of Paris modernism, French classicism, German expressionism and Spanish tenebrism. But from all these exemplars he made something distinctively his own. In 1981 he married the art historian Katharine Crouan. Last year she wrote perceptively: “Here is an artist who has devoted a lifetime to evading categorisation in his art.” One feature stands out: he looked to Europe rather than to the US, despite a residency in New York in 1979.
He absorbed what he wanted and applied it as he saw fit. He described his approach thus: “Tell the truth. Say it simply.” In the view of many observers, it all came together most effectively from about 1980. The chromatic lushness of his west Cork landscapes may have initially disconcerted some observers, but his paintings are remarkably true to their subject matter. He didn’t like to draw from nature, he explained: “There is far too much information. I like to see nature for a very short time, a second will do and the essential things are retained.”
Crozier exhibited with Arthur Tooth Sons, The Scottish Gallery, Angela Flowers Gallery, The Warren Gallery in Castletownshend and, from 1990, showed regularly with Taylor Galleries in Dublin. A mid-term retrospective was staged at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, and the RHA Gallagher Gallery, Dublin, in 1990-1991. He was elected to Aosdána in 1992 and was an honorary member of the RHA. Cian Ó hÉigertaigh made a documentary about him, The Truth About a Painter, in 1993. Lund Humphries published a monograph in 2007. His work is in numerous private and public collections. He is survived by his wife Katharine and his children Paul and Siobhán
William Crozier: Born May 5th, 1930; died July 12th, 2011