I had never met Bill Crozier. On the phone he sounded like a young man, though I knew he wasn't; irrepressible, with a warm but spiky sense of humour. He came to Belfast to adjudicate a RUA exhibition and I found a presence that was part choir boy, part sage. But all artists are chameleons.
We met up in Paris and lunched at Les Deux Magots where Picasso himself used to play with Dora Maar. Later we spent an afternoon hopping in and out of galleries on the rue de Seine, tearing reputations apart, being deliciously indiscreet. This man knows and knew everybody. He's a (briskly) walking repository of practical information, gossip, insights, arcana and anecdote about the worlds of literature and art. We met up again at one of his homes in Hampshire, England – he's a bit like a Chinese Box this man – you never know what's going to come out. As it happens, and it was a Sunday morning, he had been pumping out his cellar in the wake of flooding, before the boiler exploded! The house/garden/studio seems longer than a hundred metre racetrack. Clever. Lots of wall space for hanging work. He's married to an art historian. Even cleverer.

BMcA: Bill, you were born in Yoker, Scotland, but have lived in Dublin, Paris, Malaga, Cork, London and Hampshire, amongst other places. What imprint did your early childhood leave on you, and is there a connection between your childhood and your seeming restlessness?
BC: Yes! Both had enormous influence. Being brought up in Scotland, of Irish parentage, one always had a sense of never really belonging. Intellectually we looked to somewhere else – the Ireland that we looked towards no longer existed. All my father's friends were Irish and most of his employees as well. Later in life I recognised the same imaginary world of the Irish diaspora when I lived in New York and, not unsurprisingly, I took to it.
There is some evidence that some of my family, the Milliken's, were travellers and so it entered my thinking as a kind of defence, and an explanation. You begin to build a mythology about yourself, which makes sense of your experience and the real world, or just the imagination of innocence.
On the day I graduated from Glasgow School of Art I went to Paris. This was in 1953 and I believed that Paris was where culture and art was to be found. Paris had not quite recovered from the war. With my blond hair and Glasgow accent I was often taken to be German, with unfortunate results. After about nine months I retreated to London, which I found to be just as foreign as France and much duller. Without making a conscious choice I found myself with acquaintances and friends who were, like me, immigrants: the displaced of Europe. Later I gravitated from Chelsea to Soho, and that has been the centre of my London, on and off, ever since.
My own sojourn in Paris was another romantic journey, though alas without an heiress. I was enamoured with Sartre and existentialism. While at School in Troon I had ordered Les Temps Modernes which I regarded as a kind of sacred object, more so because I could not understand it, as my French was so rudimentary. I read all of Sartre's plays, philosophical writings, essays and anything by him that was in translation. Sartre was my hero and, in Paris, I saw him frequently, though sadly I did not have the confidence to meet him. The existential concept of alienation thrilled me. As for restlessness, I have borne it all my life. Every spring and autumn it reaches a crisis point. It is a physical need. I must travel; escape.

BMcA: Do you have any sense of belonging; or to put it another way, as a Scot who has lived for long periods in Ireland, what do you see as your identity, especially as Brian Fallon claims that you are ‘an Irish citizen for many years'?
BC: I am an Irish citizen and I have worn out a number of passports. Now I probably think of myself as a European living at home – a handy concept that is more a defence against intrusion than an explanation. I have been offered other nationalities: French, Spanish and, strangely, Venezuelan. These I did not accept, just as I have resisted invitations to exhibit in surveys of generations or decades. Also, I like to make a clear distinction between my art and myself.
My friend, Brian Fallon, has a remarkable concept of identity in regard to degrees of Irishness and I doubt if I meet his strict qualifications, but we have never discussed it. I see identity differently. I have a need to be myself and to be myself alone. I have little enthusiasm for generalities of identity, Irish or otherwise. Nowadays, the term artist has no specific meaning. It is an insufficient identity tag. However, people I respect refer to me as an Irish artist and I am happy and honoured that they do so.
I find that I feel quite at home any where in the Mediterranean (Figs 3&4). In the new Europe of the EU which I have always believed in, my only regret is that they are worried about taking in the Arab world. Without the ancient world how could I be the artist I am?

BMcA: I was intrigued to note, being a playwright myself, that you worked as a theatre decorator from 1953-56. Do you think that the experience worked its way into your painting?
BC: Enormously so. Sometimes you take a decision that has no rationale. I was in Dublin and thought that I'd love to work for the theatre. I was always stage-struck so I applied to the Olympia. When I told them my price they were appalled but they agreed on the basis that that was the price I was used to getting! It all corresponded with the beginning of knowing about American large-scale painting. I did almost every theatre in Dublin after that, and then I went to London and worked at the Palladium, Sadler's Wells and so on.
All the sets were painted in the wings and you couldn't see the whole set at one time. I learned the skills of scale: of how to make things real; of how to do panelling with two strokes of paint! My theatrical career ended when the playwright, Ann Jellicoe, introduced me to the Royal Court Theatre in London. In 1958 I went to the first night of Beckett's double bill: Endgame and Krapp's Last tape. I found the evening depressing – too self-conscious and stagey: a prose writer's concept of the stage. Maybe Beckett should have spent more time looking at B movies, which invariably have fewer words than his plays.
The theatre has had a permanent influence on my painting. I tend to ‘light' my paintings, as they would do in a play or opera (Fig1). I use, consciously and naturally, various leitmotifs to unite the space. I listen to Wagner almost every day, not for the content but for the structure, the means by which the artist keeps the passion and the architecture of the picture taut, like a spring.

BMcA: You had a long teaching career: Bath Academy of Art, Corsham; the Central School of Art and Design in London; and Winchester School of art where you were Head of Fine Art until you retired in 1987. Has the teaching been central to your art, or merely enabled it financially?
BC: I never thought of teaching at all until I had to. One day, walking down Southampton Row in London, I met William Scott who told me get a job! and he took me into the Central School to meet Morris Kestleman. It was purely for the money at the start. On another occasion I met my guardian angel, Scott. Again. ‘Would you like to stand in for me at Corsham?' Corsham was, at that point, the most progressive art school in England, so I said yes. In the late 60s I was offered the job at Winchester. I don't think I was a very good teacher. I could teach people who had a visionary eye but I couldn't teach people who weren't interested. By the time I left I was a dinosaur in the art school world.

BMcA: Keith Hartley characterised your work in the late 50s as ‘a powerful abstract idea loosely based on the study of landscape motifs', and landscape whether abstracted or more figuratively based, seems to be a central focus. How to do you view Landscape as a genre, now? What have you learned about it? Do you have any specific attitude towards it?
BC: The two people who influenced me most, a lifetime's influence, would be Picasso and Malevich, neither of whom did much in the landscape tradition. Picasso invented a pictorial language for the portrait; Malevich gave us compositional exactitude. He was the great constructor. Go and look at most Russian painting and you see the same tradition: making construction carry the emotion. Landscape was a vehicle through which I could say anything. I could do it in any amount of colours, turn it upside down, make it have moods, make it carry a different meaning. Landscape is not the subject; it is the vehicle through which I can express intangible things. Things which have no narrative. Loss, memory – all can be done through the language of landscape. The landscape almost takes a part, as if an actor (Fig 2).
I was passing the same place for ten years: a park with a tree. One day I saw it differently. I went to the studio and painted it. I realised that almost everything I had done was a long time in gestation. Something had accumulated and something was triggered. I realised that all I had to do was to wait for the painting. In my landscapes I have no topographical sense. I rarely make sketches. I can only do something if this selective thing happens.
I usually try to paint a picture in one go, as I can work all day without a break. It is chaotic. Nothing works. So I change it. It needs to be more dramatic but at the end of the day there's another person in the room–the past–who tells you it has failed. I‘m so emotionally involved I can then carry on and do a small painting on the same subject, and it's finished in ten minutes: the initial part was clearing the vision. The structure of the painting has to be that it won't fall down! Picasso said that he would love to do a drawing that an engineer could build. The connection with landscape is a means of introducing emotional quality.
I love pictures like Claude's Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba there's no evidence of anything happening. Total stillness. Is the sun rising or setting? If setting then she is sailing to the west at night. If rising, it's to the east. It had a big influence on me. I like my pictures to have something of that something else going on.

BMcA: Tell us about that period in your life 1957 –1970 when you were being shown with the likes of Jorn, Appel and Mathieu at the Arthur Tooth & Son Gallery in London, and when you also had numerous one-man exhibitions at the Drian Galleries in London? Did this come about from Herbert Read reproducing one of your works in his influential Contemporary British Art which was first published in 1951?
BC: I met Herbert Read a few times. I was intimidated. He had known everyone. He phoned and asked me to have tea with him at the old ICA in Dover Street so I went along and asked me about that picture. He wanted to put it in the book, which he did. We talked about his idea of Europeanness and he identified quite clearly the northern/southern aspects of art. I loved the idea of German Expressionism but was beginning to change my mind. I didn't want to sock with one blow. I wanted a picture to come at you slowly. I was looking around for different things to do.
That painting, The Big Country, (from the name of the film), came about because I had gone to see the film the night before I painted the picture. For a faction of a second there was a landscape on the screen, a world outside the plot. Read was interested in the fact that it came from the cinema. At the same time, John Deakin, the photographer, was taking still photos of television and using them as illustrations. They had a Baconesque quality and I remember thinking that I could do that with Casablanca but I never did, though that film was an endless source of interest to me, perhaps more as an opera than a film.
With the Drian Gallery, the director, Halima Nalecz, was Polish. All her artists were from continental Europe and in her case Read would have been a big influence. (the ‘Drian' is the end part of ‘Mondrian') . At Tooth's the Director, Peter Cochrane, liked modern French and European art, so I fitted in. I met Appel and Jorn and though I admired them both, and they were helpful to me, I was never influenced by their work. I found it too rich, too much paint; perhaps too spontaneous. They caught my eye but did not linger in my mind. I was of course much younger than them by ten – twenty years and the senior artists with the gallery were Augustus John, Antonio Tapies and Ellsworth Kelly, and you must remember youth takes no prisoners! I don't know if Read's book had much effect on my reputation, or on my career, but if you look at the younger artists he chose, they are largely the artists who still represent that time and generation, and a few are now regarded as the major British artists of today.
I was very lucky that I had a considerable reputation in my twenties, and I was often talked of as the younger of an earlier generation, rather than as one of my contemporaries. Indeed, when I was thirty I left London to live as an artist abroad, with a handsome contract from my gallery, Tooth's. But Herbert Read's writing and criticism influenced me far more. With Eric Newton, who was also very encouraging, I think that England had two of the best writers on art in the post-war period. They brought to their work intelligence, knowledge, and a historical and philosophical measure of judgement that simply does not exist today.

BMcA: Would I be correct in thinking that the brighter palette employed by you during the 80s was in some sense a re-emergence of your Scottish heritage – McTaggart, Peploe, J D Ferguson?
BC: Quite honestly, no. It was more to do with changing materials. I had loved the idea of using commercial paints, a tradition from the Cubists onward. I found that all of the things that I was doing were moving towards romanticism, and I did not want that. I wanted to break away. I was interested in one or two of the Expressionists but I had known Ferguson personally when I was in Glasgow, and I was very familiar with the work of the Scottish Colourists. There was and is something very attractive about Peploe, Hunter and Cadell. At their best they can be gems. They still have that sense and look of early modernism, that touch of the Cote D'Azur – even if it is Loch Lomond or the Western Isles. But their colour has no emotional role to play in their work. They placed their vision upon the landscape and on their still-lifes. They did not, like Edward Munch, ‘hear the scream of nature'. I think the reputation of a Scottish colourist tradition does not bear much examination–too much flake white for my temperament.

BMcA: Brian Fallon noted the impact on your work of German Expressionism as well as the French influences. How did this come about?
BC: I wouldn't disagree with Brian on this point but if he had added Russian Constructivism, the early Renaissance, votive painting, Mexican popular prints and a host of other interests I would be just as positive. I think art critics tend to look for coherence in an artist's work. It is after all their job to try and make sense of what they see. For my part I don't know where I'm going when I stand before the empty canvas. There is some drive of vision and I rob the past, I devour what takes my interest, whether it is expressionism, the French tradition, Persian carpets, primitives, the romantics, this month's Vogue magazine or the cinema.
Bad painting has no influences – the guiding principle of self-expression. But art has its measures, its weights and balances, a common currency of aspiration. From time to time I find that some intense interests show themselves more openly in my work or influences mix and transmute. Sometimes they are conscious implants, sometimes not. What is not known to the artist is the picture he or she will be painting in the future. Enthusiasms come and go. New elements appear and are abandoned and then reappear a year later. There have been winters when I have kept the studio stove ablaze with failures, and moments when I could not make a mistake.

BMcA: You were in Paris (and then London) at a key period in art history, the 1950s. Whom did you meet and work with then? Were you aware of particular artists being useful to you, and can you give us a quick sketch of the period?
BC: You should have been a barrister! In Paris in the 50's the great names of 20th-century Modernism were still the major figures: Picasso and Matisse were having important exhibitions of current work and they were still productive on a massive scale. At the Musee de L'Art Modern in the early 50s, I saw two large rooms of paintings by Picasso, that he had painted in a day, and other rooms of Matisse's cut-outs. On the other hand a younger generation were establishing themselves and I was attractaed to an area of art that had no connection with my work. The constructions of Yaacov Agam, Julio Le Parc, and Jesus-Rafael Soto, and the artists of the Galerie Denise Rene.
This was a quirk in my enthusiasms, but it has remained, and I think their work anticipated much of what was to happen in the future. The painters I liked then I have continued to appreciate: Serge Poliakoff, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Alfred Manessier. Despite their break with the past they retained the qualities of ‘good painting' A few years later the New York School made them look academic, but I think time has reversed that opinion. The first indications that something in New York was beginning to have some influence was that the younger French artists were falling heavily for the American style. Almost all of them now are completely forgotten. However, French painting had lost its confidence and the muse had moved on.
In London something similar was happening but the artists were more robust. I was lucky in that I had friends who were the mainstay of the post-war generations: both Roberts, Colquhoun and McBryde, I met on a daily basis, and I was on easy speaking terms with William Scott, John Minton, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, simply because I was exhibiting, and took part in the social art world of the time. The social life of artists and writers in the London of the 50s centred on the clubs and pubs of Hampstead, Chelsea and Soho. In a long day it was possible to meet almost everyone in the art world, and easy friendships were established and abandoned. My relations with Bacon were typical. We inhabited the same small world, spoke frequently, were never close friends and moved in different circles. This close-knit but casual society had no class or economic structure. It existed because there was no established cultural world, unlike Paris or New York.

BMcA: Was Malaga, the birthplace of Picasso, formative for you?
BC: In 1959 I was living in London during one of the worst winters ever. Anthony Cronin wrote to me saying that he was taking a year in Spain. He had taken a house and was going to write The Life of Reilly and would I like to come and share a house? I decided to accept, so I went to an antique shop and they bought everything in my house. I phoned the P & O Line, went down to London docks, and got a ship to Gibraltar - a one-day decision. At Customs in Gibraltar my passport said artist but this was misinterpreted as ‘artiste' as I was flamboyantly dressed, and it was assumed that I was an actor and well-off. I had lost the keys to my luggage and the customs officer took out his gun and shot off the lock. I thought this was my sort of place!
Our village was Alhaurin El Grande (the great garden of Allah). The Moors had worked the land for over 1000 years. The influence of this grew with experience, largely from the family I had hired to help with the house. They were descendents of the Moors and they stimulated my interest in Arabic Spain. I knew that Picasso had been born in Malaga but I had no idea what an influence Malaga had been on him. The portraits, the rooms, the light and shadows in his pictures, are all Malaguenan. But perhaps more than Picasso, I found another part of my nature there. In the forty years or so that have passed since I first visited Malaga, I have thought about it almost every day.

BMcA: You're often linked largely to Cork, I suppose because you have a studio there. What have you gained from your association with this area?
BC: I've made a bit of a play for Cork. My connection with Cork city and West Cork goes back about fifty years, in my youth I was fond of walking and climbing, and by the early 1950s I had walked round and across Ireland and had climbed every hill and mountain worthy of note. But West Cork won my heart. I have returned to it many times over my life and about twenty years ago I bought a house in Kilcoe, near Skibbereen, and it is still the paradise it was half a century ago (Figs 5 & 6).
I'm very much aware of my position there. When I first settled there in the early 1980s I was a refugee from London. I was thrilled that I could have another life and I never told anyone that I was a painter. I just pottered about and read, thoroughly enjoying myself. Then I was asked to put a picture into a big show Cork Art Now at the Crawford. I got the first prize.
So I started talking about Cork as the new Pont Aven and it snowballed a bit. Guys started grumbling in Dublin. I had moved into a self-invented classical idea of some sort of Eden, an innocent perfect world. Round about the same time we visited Greece for a fortnight. Every day I went down to Piraeus and took a boat to an island. I'm interested in the idea of Odysseus and eternal sailing. What was miraculous was that I found the Greek islands, with all their historical resonance, the equivalent of the hundred islands of Roaring Water Bay, which I can see from my front door in Cork. The islands of Greece and West Cork became interchangeable in my imagination (Figs 7 & 8). Our Cork ones have their own mystery with names like Paris, Horse Island, Long Island.
Our neighbour in Kilcoe, Dennis Collins – he's dead now – wasn't in our century at all. He had a harelip and was a giant man and I'd see him in the morning with his scythe over his shoulder. What he told me every day was that he was going down to see the mermaids who'd tell him that people were trying to steal his fields, or poison his cattle. He didn't believe in the common idea of property (Fig 9).
Dennis was to me a carrier of a great tradition. His world was at once factual and imaginative. Here was my neighbour, a farmer, nearer in spirit and speech to the ancient world, which powered my imagination. It was a great privilege to know him. I still like my paintings to have that quality of innocence, and it's a great fortune for an artist in that the old world is vanishing at the same time as the new world is starting. All the things I like are then present: affection, a sense of loss and longing, and I caught that mood in Cork. Rural Ireland has vanished and has been replaced by a new generation and by new people fresh to the land.
In McDaid's Bar in Dublin the 1950s, I remember Patrick Kavanagh roaring at some fellow who had moved from countryman to city gent: ‘you've still got cow shit on your boots' – that would be a compliment now. My debt to the landscape of West Cork is immeasurable. It has been for me my Saint Remy, my Mont Sainte Victoire, my Tahiti. It has quite overshadowed my previous life. I have seen West Cork in the past and witnessed its decline and regeneration. We are always ambivalent about change but I am happy with what I see: a new confident, prosperous, well-educated generation – immigrants bringing their talents, a dramatic rise in population to almost pre-famine levels. I feel very proud to be part of this Ireland. n

Brian McAvera is a playwright, art critic and curator.