William Crozier Watermeadows, 1977

From 1976-80, whilst based in Winchester, Crozier worked on a series of large-scale oil paintings the Watermeadows (the Swift's Lake series). The subject, the grassy lowland around Swift's Lake visible from the artist's studio window, was at first depicted by Crozier as damp and melancholy, echoing the description in Keats' Ode to Autumn, 1819. The later works in the series transformed, as the artist began to admire the landscape. Crozier found himself painting freely, in a looser style, stepping away from his previous focus of the post-war condition, to the primitive power of landscape. The paintings each over 2 metres in width were painted at great speed, and unusually for the artist, each canvas was completed in a single session. This work, along with 5 others from the series, was first exhibited in Spring 1, curated by David Annesley at the Serpentine Gallery in 1978, and recently in 2018 was shown at The Irish Museum of Modern Art in the touring exhibition William Crozier : The Edge of the Landscape.