Professor Crowley's current Irish landscapes reflect a contemporary Ireland, with “wildly coloured” houses and other buildings which he feels reflect the new found confidence, the resurgence, of the “Celtic tiger”. He retreats to West Cork when not teaching, to his house depicted in his vibrant Red Mill (above).

With his big landscapes, he first paints the background with, for example, Paynes grey, cream or white. Parts are then wiped off and then the ′local colour′ applied, which he explains is painted in ′its immediate and local value′:

"Instead of trying to paint darker yellow bits and darker green bits in the way that somebody more conventional might, you can't get the hues where the shadow is. To actually have that sense of authenticity, you're also going to have to pitch the colours … like two octaves."

The local colours are not painted in as a wash. He told DE:

"The local colours have to be painted opaqually, because most of them are pastels anyway. So, as soon as you put white in a colour, it calcifies. There's white underneath, but if you're painting pink, cream, and pale grey and pale blue houses, you're, by definition you're painting in pastel colours. There's only one way of painting pastel and that's to use white.

It's the difference between painting a sky blue and painting a plate blue, like the Wedgwood. As soon as you put the white, it calcifies and becomes opaque, it moves forwards. If you just use oil and a bit of manganese or selenium, it recedes and flies away from you. That's how you make deep space.

Each time it has to dry. At each stage it has to be dry and then when I do the grey and the black, I cover the whole painting with a polymerised resin, a medium, very very thin and very flat and I paint in that so that that gives … I'm actually painting wet into wet rather than sort of wet on dry as it were, which it what it looks like. There's far more slippage to these pictures than at first appears."

 

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