The sun rises on a stunning winter day in Dulcot, in the Coal River Valley, as Rick Crossland packs up to go to “work”. Impatient to get off before the light changes, he nearly forgets two very important items, his padded jacket and his beanie.
He is chasing the light and needs to get onsite by 7.30am, dressed in multiple layers adequate for the four-degree morning. Thermals, mid-layer, an old, paint-spattered hoody, and then the equally paint-spattered jacket; woollen fingerless mittens and Blunnies.
The image is something medieval, or out of a Dickens novel. Crossland gets paint everywhere. “I’m a messy painter,” he admits.
The backpack (also decorated with paint) sits waiting by the car. It is bulging with boards, tripod, paint box, brushes, paint, wet painting carrier, rags, solvent. “Mustn’t forget that solvent.” He forgot it once on a painting trip to Flinders Island and had to use raw, thick, goopy paint. It was an expensive mistake, and the painting took ages to dry.
He is off to Montagu Bay this morning. He has seen a scene that he needs to capture in the early morning light. Anxiously looking at the sky to the east as he puts his gear in the car, he spots a big bank of cloud threatening to deaden the light. “Bloody weather forecast, got it wrong,” he mutters. “Oh well, I’ll go anyway and see what I can come up with”.
. . .
Rick Crossland grew up in working-class cotton mill country in the north of England. A quiet child, he spent a lot of time roaming the local moors with his dog, and there he developed a love of landscape and nature. He knew he could draw well from an early age and remembers accidentally handing in his high school chemistry homework with caricatures of all his teachers in the margin. He was very pleased (and surprised) when these got marked favourably along with his chemistry homework.
Despite this he wasn’t encouraged to pursue his art and struggled with courage to paint. He felt he had to get a “proper job”. He completed a master’s degree in an agriculture-related topic and attained a private pilot’s licence, only to hit a wall of limited opportunities in the austerity of Margaret Thatcher’s UK.
Then, in 1985, he saw a job in Tasmania.
. . .
Despite always drawing – in school, during university lectures, on buses and trains, in letters to his girlfriend – Crossland hadn’t spent much time painting seriously. Despite, or maybe in response to, his feeling of dislocation as a recent immigrant to Tasmania, he found himself painting his new home whenever he could. After a flutter with flying as a career, he settled into supporting his family through a job in agriculture. Moving around the state with his work and on family holidays, he grabbed moments to record many corners of Tasmania. He was often found by the side of a narrow rural track with pencil and pad in hand, taking a quick break from the intense crop harvest season, or on a beach or the edge of a busy street, with his easel, oblivious to traffic and people passing by.
He worked initially in watercolour, then gouache, then oils. As his confidence grew, along with mountains of “oil-on-board” sketches, he entered local art competitions and approached galleries to try and sell some work. He had some success in Deloraine, where he lived at the time, and then at the Salamanca Collection (now Colville Gallery).
Critiquing his paintings, Joerg Andersch, the Mercury art critic in the 90’s, wrote, “Crossland’s paintings are superb and traditional, but in an easy, loose style with a lovely luminosity rarely seen these days.”
Unfortunately work, health and family life slowed the momentum, and it was many years before Ricks art appeared in a gallery again. This did not, however, stop the growth of the “oil-on-board mountain” of Tasmanian images in his shed. He continued to paint. “I have to paint. It’s what I do.”
Self-taught, Crossland describes his work as introspective. “It’s what moves me. It’s not about details, though they have their place. Its real, impressionist, sometimes bordering on abstract. The result is an interpretation of the subject through what I see.
“I find that if you can be selective whilst maintaining fidelity to what you are looking at, it will reflect the feeling you first had when you saw it.”
Crossland paints whatever hooks him at the time, dictated by the mood, the light, the weather, the season. “I don’t really have a plan.” Indeed, he struggles with planning! His mind works like mist – it swirls, and thoughts wander and then evaporate before they crystallise.
“It’s nothing deep – I just paint what I see,” he says. “What I find beautiful at the time – rocks and waves, the sunlight on an oatstack, an old shearing shed, the afternoon light on the snow in the bush, a busy street scene, figures on the beach.
“It’s Tasmania as I see it.”
He prefers to paint from life and outdoors (en plein air). Landscape work is completed on location, with only minor adjustments back in the studio. “It’s always about the effects of light. I can go down to the beach and the sun can be breaking through the cloud and then in another minute it can be bland and boring. I always prefer to paint in front of the subject. All the answers are there in front of you, you see people and stuff you just can’t invent. The colours of a black pony, half in the sun, half in the shade, the shift of light on the ocean, or an elderly lady walking on the beach in her wellies. You can’t invent this stuff, it’s just amazing. I don’t like working from photos.
“As illustrator Meade Schaeffer alluded, ‘A photograph gives you everything, except what you need’. I prefer to paint what I see, not what I think I should see.”
The 2020 Covid restrictions did not really affect Crossland. Unlike fellow plein air painters in Europe and America, he managed to keep on painting outside, when his fulltime job as a field officer in the poppy industry allowed. But in 2021 Covid caught up with him when his 36-year career in agriculture ended due to a decline in global demand for surgical pain relief during the pandemic.
Every cloud has a silver lining, however, now officially retired from agriculture, Crossland can at last devote his time to his art.
. . .
At the end of a day chasing the light, back in his open-air studio, Rick Crossland is cold and tired. “So many subject choices and wasted time deciding what to paint; had to fix leg on easel, cam lock loose, and breeze kept blowing easel over; weather and light changed twice so I had to repaint.” Then he pauses and looks thoughtfully at the weather app while he warms up by the fire. “I’m going again tomorrow morning,” he says. “Got to get that light right.”
Rick Crossland’s work has received recognition through a long list of awards, including finalist in the prestigious Alice Bale Portraiture 2007 and Travelling Scholarship 2018 Awards, and finalist in the Lloyd Rees Art Award 2017. He has twice won of the Art Society of Tasmania Annual Award in 2015 and 2020, and was overall winner of the Tasmanian “Art on Show” Award in 2017.
As an exhibiting member of the Tasmanian Art Society, Crossland exhibits and sells his paintings through the Lady Franklin Gallery. His work is also for sale through the Hobart Art Gallery, Artists of Richmond, his web site (www.rickcrosslandart.com) mand his and his Instagram (@rckcrossland).
Crossland will be having a solo exhibition of his latest work at the Lady Franklin Gallery from December 4, 2021 to January 15, 2022. For more about this exhibition, see artstas.com.au.