Landscape, England depicts a sparse, expansive plane. The scale of the work serves to impose this landscape upon the viewer and one is physically dwarfed by the painting. Crozier constructed the picture with the intention of working upon the viewer’s senses, and he overwhelms us with its intense scale and stark, fulsome colours. A series of long, smooth brushstrokes at the top of the canvas create an earthy green horizon line, far out of reach. By pushing the sky away to the top of the painting, Crozier situates the viewer in his landscape. In viewing the work, one seems to experience the place just as Crozier did - one seems to stand in his shoes. The composition of the painting is divided with wending tree trunks, placed in arcing parallel lines. The underlying compositional structure is provided by powerful planes of unmodulated colour – red, blue, yellow. Crozier shared a non-naturalistic approach to colour with contemporaries including Howard Hodgkin and St Ives painters such as Terry Frost. This has a disorientating effect, serving to confuse the relationships between sky and earth, sea and coast. (Though the painting is titled ‘Landscape’, one may be looking across a flame red harbour or lake.) Crozier’s approach is again calculated, serving to slip behind the viewer’s expectations and overwhelm them with his artistic vision of the place. Crozier always worked on his landscapes from a specific place. Though it is not always clear where this may be, it is important to know that we are witnessing a creative act of transcription – not merely a flavourful invention devised, ex nihilo, in the artist’s studio. Crozier lived between Cork and Hampshire in the nineteen-eighties and -nineties. He had previously taught in Hampshire at the Winchester School of Art, and Landscape, England stems from a period of work undertaken while staying in this part of southern England. The painting was executed at a mature stage in Crozier’s career when he was working with a considerable degree of technical fluidity. Working wet in wet, he has brushed a series of continuous strokes in the lower foreground, for example – an allusive series of streaks in brilliant robust colours, with blue in green and pink in purple. The freedom of these marks suggests remarkable confidence and bravura. The rhythmically applied patterns in the surface, with finely brushed streaks of green across the red ground, are equally fluid and delectable. Executed some four years after Trees by the Sea (1985, National Galleries Scotland), Landscape, England demonstrates the leap in Crozier's creative freedom. Indeed, it may be regarded as the beginning of a highly productive late period in his career. Though important, Trees by the Sea displays more naturalistic colouring and less imaginative surface effects. Aside from the National Galleries Scotland, Crozier also has works in the Arts Council Collection, Glasgow Museums and Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, among others.