Alf Crossley: The Kootenays in Brushstrokes

BC's distinctive wilderness has inspired and nurtured such a varied abundance of accomplished landscape painters as Emily Carr, Jack Shadbolt, Toni Onley, Paul Arness, Ann Kipling and Maxwell Bates, representing a formidable tradition for Canadian painters like Alf Crossley. Yet, even though Conceptual Art requires a cerebral distance from its subject which doesn't engage him, Crossley's style is also conceptual because he integrates the creative process.

As with Oriental calligraphy, masterful brushstrokes distil forms into sweeps of lines or planes. Washes may dilute them, like mist or haze dissolves the form of a tree into certain constituent elements---still recognizably a tree, but not a snapshot of one. Refracted colours are recorded with the palette knife. Lines of grass or tree trunks break up the canvas like stained glass. Thick overcoats, which almost obliterate all but a few isolated pockets of colour, evoke the effects of a deluge in a cedar rainforest, or snow across a field. Thusly, Crossley stays true to his Abstract Impressionist / Expressionist roots, with one notable exception.

Crossley's paintings and drawings: never wholly "complete," except when they "are." Crossley brings a painting or drawing to a certain stage mise en scene. Sometimes, this means the image is self-sufficient and requires nothing else.

Often, he brings them back to his studio where other processes like memory or educated sensitivity to form enact change. Layers of graphite might need to be applied or erased, for example. Sometimes, over decades, he works in different natural settings, where other elements of scenery provide archetypal forms to be incorporated in a particular canvas.

Representational elements leave his art personable and approachable, yet there is always the place where each painting and drawing acquires a supra-natural quality, where the fluctuation between critical, objectified thought and subconscious, instinctual response achieves a transcendent and transpersonal third state, like communion. Because this landscape is vanishing under the onslaught of global warming, rampant development, and years of resource extraction/exploitation, these paintings are clarion calls.

There are always those who want to capture every twig, fibre, and clod within a visual instant and hold it still and immovable, like a bug pinned to a shadowbox, as a marker for memory. Naturalistic landscapes turned Robert Bateman and Glen Loates into superstars, after all. On CBC's radio program, Words at Large, "The true story: Charles Foran, Anna Porter and Donald Antrim talk about mixing fact and fabrication in memoir," three writers discussed struggles to liberate nonfiction from such approaches to realism, showing how it actually made the subject less real, like minimalism reduced to its most nihilistic elements. Anna Porter, for example, described how her larger-than-life father's exaggerated storytelling included outright lies, which she recorded. This was his experience of reality; if others disagreed, they were free to write their own.

Moving back from literary forms to art, there isn't such a slavish need for artists to conform to rigid representations, and hasn't been for the past century. But the fallacy is that abstraction removes the art from reality, hence is not as "pure" as photography or photographic representation. While photojournalists struggle with how far photographs have departed from objectivity---as Marcia E. Vetrocq describes in, Rules of Engagement, Art in America, June/July 2008---by returning to particular pieces over the period of several decades, and superimposing changes onto his work, Crossley achieves depths of perception that the ephemerality of photos fail to catch.

This 3-part series commences with Alf Crossley: The Kootenays En Plein Air, and continues with Alf Crossley in the Vanishing Landscapes of BC.

Birch Forest from Sand Creek Country

Untitled Painting: 10 of 13 October 2007

Slocan Lake from Wilson Creek

Untitled Painting 3 of 13: October 2007

Tranquil Enclave

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