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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.
