Details
| First Name | Robert |
| Last Name | Crozier |
| Username | robertcrozier |
| Region | Edinburgh & The Lothians |
| Disciplines | Painting, Printmaking |
| Themes | Architecture, Botanical, Figurative, Landscape |
Statement
| Statement | The subject of my visual work has gone through several stages, influenced by my life at the time. My work for several years after leaving art college might be described as genre painting with many pub scenes and aspects of city life. I also tried to find a way of incorporating familiar modern objects which involved creating figures from them. Later I used a similar technique forming figures from elements of Edinburgh’s classical architecture to represent the city where I have spent so much of my life. While in France with a garden that I created and views of the Haute Vienne forest, I began to paint more green subjects. Perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, my close observation of nature has also led me to producing more abstract works. My last solo show at the Sutton Gallery in 2015, ‘Natural and Unnatural Worlds’, included works that crossed into abstraction, such as ‘The Forest in Sun and Rain’. I can be as enchanted as the next person with a ‘host of golden daffodils’ but coming across such a scene recently, I found myself looking at the stems and leaves, the dark tones where they were bunched near the ground, the different tones where the light hit the curved-over leaves. I was storing up colour and structure ideas that would result in something very different from what I would produce if I were to set up an easel en plein air – something I haven’t done since I was a schoolboy. |
Biography
| Biography | I am a painter, printmaker and ludic poet. Born in Buckie, I was brought up in Orkney. I attended Edinburgh College of Art where I won an Andrew Grant Scholarship and exhibited in the Young Contemporaries’ Exhibition, London. In 1971 I was included in an Arts Council exhibition ‘Scottish Realism’ with John Bellany, William Gillon, Ian McLeod and Alexander Moffat which opened in the Arts Council Gallery in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh and toured throughout Scotland in six other venues. I became a regular exhibitor at the SSA but lapsed as a member when I bought a property in France around the turn of the century and spent a good portion of the year there. After selling the French house in 2018 I succeeded in rejoining the SSA as a Professional Member. Over the years I have had several solo shows of paintings, the most recent being in the Sutton Gallery, Dundas Street in 2015. I joined Edinburgh Printmakers in its second incarnation above the Fruitmarket Gallery where I produced screen prints. When the Workshop moved to Union Street, I gave up screen printing and concentrated on coloured linocuts produced by the reduction method. I had two solo print shows in the gallery there and several in other venues. I have work in the Government Collection, the Ritchie Collection and those of Aberdeen Asset Management, the Arts and Theatre Trust, Fife, Edinburgh University, Napier University. Lothian Education Committee, Leeds Education Committee, Midlothian County Council, Aberdeen Libraries, Art in Healthcare and many private collections. As a ludic poet I have produced calligrams and other visual poems, various bestiaries and invented a comic form which I call the ‘Thingabout’.It begins with a complaint and proceeds with as many lines as required with the same rhyme, before concluding with a couplet with a different rhyme e.g. The thing about age /is you can rant and rage/like a beast in a cage/but you can’t disengage/or turn back the page/and there isn’t a stage/of being worthy and sage/as a long adolescence/goes straight to senescence. I have also produced a small collection of clerihews on printing techniques. The one on linocutting is as follows: Linocuts/must be made by making ruts/in the right floor-covering stuff./For these prints fitted carpets, kelims and dhurries are all duff.
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