William Crozier
Katherine Crouan (ed) with essays by S B Kennedy and Philip Vann
Lund Humphries, Hampshire, 2007
pp 208 ills 200 col 176 b/w 24 h/b
Û50.00/£35.00 ISBN 978-0-85331-970-2
Ciarán MacGonigal
Patrick Kavanagh's lines 'till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind / He said: I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance' are echoed through this account of the life and work of William Crozier.
Crozier's preoccupation with the familiar is the leitmotif of his art practice and personal aesthetic. Like O'Casey he can create the epic from small doings. Eschewing formal religion, Crozier still offers adoration at the Altar of the God of Little Things, an oblation if you like, to reveal the secrets of the mercurial world in his pictorial creation. What is not explained, and is possibly impervious to explanation is Crozier's opulent, not to say voluptuous, sense of colour. If you'd said Spain or the diaspora of Sephardim along the route to Aleppo or some Damascene background or Egypt and then to Europe I could understand it, but on the face of it, how could Crozier, an artist of Irish descent but Scottish reared, from his very earliest days produce that brilliant vividness of colour? Maybe his love of Catalu–a and Barcelona will someday surface in a history bound up with Isabella and Ferdinand or some such.
The artist's lack of a fixed formula for representation is important in explaining how he moves from theme and subject, and given that he was friends with and part of the groupings, social and otherwise, of the greats of post-war British art, he remains a solitary enough figure. Crozier is the quintessential modern European man, although with strong north Celtic touches (to use an awkward phrase). Or if you prefer, a country-based metropolitan who could talk to his West Cork neighbour Dennis Collins about conversations with the mermaids. These wondrous creatures of the sea are doomed to only ever listen outside the sanctuary of the Church to its services. Look at them carved on the apse in the Romanesque Clonfert Cathedral and see if you don't believe Dennis Collins.
In his essay, Dr S B Kennedy provides an excellent and rounded account of the painter and of his milieu. In 'A Man of Imagination' Philip Vann gives a vivid portrayal of the artist as the imaginative fount; in the text and photographs Professor Crouan gives the best of sources - the insider account of his life and works - being married to the painter, not always an enviable position when editing a book on an artist but she avoids all the obvious pitfalls which turn a critic into a hagiologist, especially a spouse. The textual references and notes by its editor are very good indeed and offer a comprehensive synoptic form to enable admirers of the artist's work to more readily understand the history of the works and the painter's peregrinations which powerfully impact on the artist's aesthetic and the outpouring of work from a vigorous hand and mind's eye. The excellent colour plates, fascinating photographs and overall design and layout enables the reader to consider and fill in details which have been lacking hitherto. That refuge of the lazy reader, the index, is somewhat truncated in its references and would have been useful for such figures as Angela Flowers and her gallery who appear in the text; Sarah Finlay, a once very powerful visual arts officer with the Arts Council and a proponent of modernism in all its forms, appears as Findlay side by side in a photograph with former arts and culture minister Michael D Higgins, neither of whom appear in the index. That caveat apart, this is a terrific account of a painter's life to date with solid information and opinions, and this reviewer - a friend of the artist - now knows so much more if not quite all about him.
Patrick Kavanagh's lines 'till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind / He said: I made the Iliad from such / A local row. Gods make their own importance' are echoed through this account of the life and work of William Crozier.
Crozier's preoccupation with the familiar is the leitmotif of his art practice and personal aesthetic. Like O'Casey he can create the epic from small doings. Eschewing formal religion, Crozier still offers adoration at the Altar of the God of Little Things, an oblation if you like, to reveal the secrets of the mercurial world in his pictorial creation. What is not explained, and is possibly impervious to explanation is Crozier's opulent, not to say voluptuous, sense of colour. If you'd said Spain or the diaspora of Sephardim along the route to Aleppo or some Damascene background or Egypt and then to Europe I could understand it, but on the face of it, how could Crozier, an artist of Irish descent but Scottish reared, from his very earliest days produce that brilliant vividness of colour? Maybe his love of Catalu–a and Barcelona will someday surface in a history bound up with Isabella and Ferdinand or some such.
The artist's lack of a fixed formula for representation is important in explaining how he moves from theme and subject, and given that he was friends with and part of the groupings, social and otherwise, of the greats of post-war British art, he remains a solitary enough figure. Crozier is the quintessential modern European man, although with strong north Celtic touches (to use an awkward phrase). Or if you prefer, a country-based metropolitan who could talk to his West Cork neighbour Dennis Collins about conversations with the mermaids. These wondrous creatures of the sea are doomed to only ever listen outside the sanctuary of the Church to its services. Look at them carved on the apse in the Romanesque Clonfert Cathedral and see if you don't believe Dennis Collins.
In his essay, Dr S B Kennedy provides an excellent and rounded account of the painter and of his milieu. In 'A Man of Imagination' Philip Vann gives a vivid portrayal of the artist as the imaginative fount; in the text and photographs Professor Crouan gives the best of sources - the insider account of his life and works - being married to the painter, not always an enviable position when editing a book on an artist but she avoids all the obvious pitfalls which turn a critic into a hagiologist, especially a spouse. The textual references and notes by its editor are very good indeed and offer a comprehensive synoptic form to enable admirers of the artist's work to more readily understand the history of the works and the painter's peregrinations which powerfully impact on the artist's aesthetic and the outpouring of work from a vigorous hand and mind's eye. The excellent colour plates, fascinating photographs and overall design and layout enables the reader to consider and fill in details which have been lacking hitherto. That refuge of the lazy reader, the index, is somewhat truncated in its references and would have been useful for such figures as Angela Flowers and her gallery who appear in the text; Sarah Finlay, a once very powerful visual arts officer with the Arts Council and a proponent of modernism in all its forms, appears as Findlay side by side in a photograph with former arts and culture minister Michael D Higgins, neither of whom appear in the index. That caveat apart, this is a terrific account of a painter's life to date with solid information and opinions, and this reviewer - a friend of the artist - now knows so much more if not quite all about him.
Ciarán MacGonigal is working on his new book Irish Art 1900-2000.