Richard Lewis Crozier is a prolific landscape painter and a retired professor of art,
having taught at the University of Virginia for thirty-seven years. Born in Hawaii, he
received his M.F.A. from the University of California, Davis, where he studied with
contemporary American artists Wayne Thiebaud, William T. Wiley, and Roy de Forest.
He was introduced to abstract painting but also began painting landscapes en plein air .
He combined these two approaches by painting recognizable landscapes while thinking
about the painting as an object-giving the paint, texture, and surface the same
importance as the image itself. He is particularly interested in change, the landscape in
flux: the change of seasons, change of light, as well as man made alterations to the
environment. Crozier’s work has been widely exhibited. He has had solo shows in
California, Texas, New York, Washington, D.C., and throughout Virginia. In addition, his
work is in a number of important public collections all across the country.
This latest show, New Works, features scenes from Charlottesville. They are displayed
in a simple line of seemingly unimportant images: a Tire and Auto Parts store, an
overpass, a snow drift, an anatomical skeleton seated upright in a chair, and more. At
first glance, the images seem insignificant and quiet. However, walking through the
gallery the viewer experiences the opposite. The viewer takes a walk through
Charlottesville. The viewer walks past all the familiar images that bind the fabric of a
small town together, and arguably, the universe. Crozier’s genius is his ability to view all
the parts of a whole at once - no matter how far apart by space and time. By giving
attention to the places passed over, the places behind houses, under bridges - they
become necessary and important. Richard Crozier’s New Works are a cartography of
familiar, overlooked spaces that hinge and connect together the important spaces we
call “my work”, “my town”, “my street”, “my home”.
Could it be that by simply paying attention to places that are looked over, we give them
importance? And could that importance become the necessary pillars to places that
chart our cartography of “home”?