·         September 6th - September 27th, 2019

Renowned painter, Bill Crosby, was excited to display an exhibition of his artwork entitled, “Land, Water and Sky,” in the Main Gallery at The Strand Center for the Arts.

 Bill Crosby was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1938. He graduated from Boardman High School and received his terminal degree in painting from the University of Michigan in 1963. That same year, Crosby began teaching at SUNY Plattsburgh, staying there until 1998. He and his wife Pat have lived in the North Country of upstate New York for over forty years. They have three grown children, two grandchildren, and have always had one or more dogs. While continuing to reside in the 1813 stone house which they rebuilt, Crosby and his wife have been building a camp/studio/workshop on the coast of Maine since 1989.

 Over the years the Adirondacks of New York, the Maine coast, the New England mountains, the Atlantic coast, and Alaska have become the primary locations for Crosby’s photography and painting inspirations. The change of seasons is always a special passage and motivation for new work. The natural landscape of sky, earth, and water is a cathedral for life and spirit. Wilderness is both a physical place and a place of mind and spirit.

 Concerning his work, Crosby states: “Often my work can be considered as an abstract impression of the landscape. Certainly, I think of my paintings and photographs as an interpretative response to the landscape.”

 In Crosby’s upcoming show at The Strand Center for the Arts, the paintings are a response to the natural landscape of Land, Water and Sky. Although some may reference specific locations, most are a confluence of his experiences in the natural landscape. Done in the studio, they are sometimes fragmented, broken, reassembled and improvised.

 Crosby states: “I feel that there is a bold, spontaneous and emotional quality to my work. These abstract landscapes happen and develop on the canvas as gestures, washes, and colors as composition emerge. In the end the painting is its own thing: Not of some specific place but it becomes a new landscape with feeling, emotion, expression and energy. Abstract but with a sense of a horizon line the paintings are open to interpretation and one's imagination. Involved, more detailed and opaque areas are played against open transparent, underdeveloped and linear areas of the composition. Paintings are intended to challenge and excite.”