John Crossley | Ebb and Flow

John Crossley | Ebb and Flow

John Crossley's works are a law unto themselves. Over a career spanning 50 years, Crossley has taken the rules and conventions of painting, held them up to forensic scrutiny and reinvented them with a tightly woven internal logic.

Under Crossley's microscope, notions of form, texture, colour, and space are carefully dissected and reassembled as a playful index of the artist's visual interests. The resulting works are funky. They fizz and pop in candy coloured rhythms of hard-edge geometry, set against nebulous clouds of foam. The call of the sea, depicted through undulating waves, is answered by the shimmering neon lights of the pier.

Since relocating his studio to the coast, Crossley has drawn inspiration from daily walks along the seaside. This latest collection of works recalls the pioneering abstraction developed in St Ives in the middle of the 20th century. Where a tastefully placed 'blob' within a Patrick Heron painting might recall a buoy gently bobbing on the water, Crossley's blobs are more likely to recall the rattling sounds of tuppeny nudgers in an arcade.

Much of British abstraction has sat for too long in a halfway house between Cornwall and the kitchen table but Crossley's work refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or genre. The dodgem collisions of expressive gesture against the familiar patterning of everyday consumerism write a new English dictionary for abstraction- one where form and concept go, hand in hand, straight to the waltzers for a spin.

Ebb & Flow presents over 30 unique works on paper and three new exuberant  silkscreen editions making this John Crossley's most ambitious exhibition with Eames Fine Art to date. To mark the artist's 70th birthday, John is kindly offering works from his seminal 'Wish You Were Here,' series of artworks at half price with the purchase of a painting from Ebb & Flow. Further details can be found below.

We have also created a beautiful exhibition catalogue which can be purchased HERE.