Richard Crozier & David Hawkins: Perspectives on Place

Les Yeux du Monde is thrilled to announce its last exhibition of 2022, Richard Crozier and David Hawkins: Perspectives on Place, opening Friday, November 18th and running through Thursday, December 22th.

Working in the plein air tradition, Richard Crozier is widely recognized for his work painting vanishing land and cityscapes. His recent paintings are scenes much closer to home than those of the past, and many serve as visual time stamps of rapidly-changing Charlottesville vistas. Yet Crozier does not make a statement so much as evoke a feeling and a sense of the particularities that define a specific place. As he notes, “My concerns are about painting, not about narrative… I want the act of looking and the process of choosing among the myriad bits of information the eye receives and the mind processes to be useful and interesting to others as well as to me.

David Hawkins, on the other hand, constructs scenes in his monotypes and paintings that evoke dream-like spaces rather than alluding to an actual place or time. Per Hawkins, “I tend to think of myself as an image maker or craftsman rather than artist: I make pictures that tell stories or parts of stories. All my work is inspired by a massive messy library of half-forgotten poems and stories that revolve around the unseen, mystic, ghostly, and forgotten… While I don’t set out to depict specific places, I celebrate the specificity that fuels the associative and emotional engines of the representational tradition.”

While presenting different perspectives on place, the works of Crozier and Hawkins both offer viewers stirring meditations on space and time.

Richard Crozier earned a BFA from the University of Washington in Seattle and an MFA in painting at the University of California, Davis, where he studied with Wayne Thiebaud, Roy de Forest, William T. Wiley and Robert Arneson. He began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1974, where he was a beloved professor of art for over 36 years, and his work can be found in private and public collections including the J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville, KY, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC.

David Hawkins received his BA from Middlebury College, his MFA from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and studied at Slade School of Fine Art, New Orleans Academy of Fine Art, and the University of Virginia. He has exhibited paintings and prints nationally and internationally, and his works are held in public and private collections including the Emily Couric Cancer Center at the University of Virginia, Dominion Energy, Boar’s Head Resort, and the University of Louisville.