(gentle music) - We were living in London in a small bed sitter, and I was doing my part-time teaching, and she was with the American Embassy.

She was getting a newspaper from the States, saw this ad for a farmhouse in Maine with a hundred acres for $4,000 and she thought, wow, you know, we are living in an area maybe 20 feet by 30 feet, that sounded to us like an estate, a huge estate, you know?

And this is incredible, fancy having living on a place like that.

So in spur of the moment, we decided to pack up and leave.

(gentle music) So I fell in love with Maine, actually very early and I think if it wasn't for Maine, I would never be, I don't think I'd be in this country.

You know, Maine is, in some ways it's like Scotland.

It's a very beautiful place and I can't imagine myself living anywhere else in the United States.

We went out to California once, my late wife and I with the idea that we might settle there, but after two weeks we decided, no, we're coming back to Maine and we did.

(gentle music) My driving force began as art, and I would start doing little drawings at home and put 'em up in the mantle piece.

Little kind of semi surrealist drawings.

I remember one, my first drawing, I remember I named it, it was always good.

I always enjoyed naming them.

This was called Phantasmagoria.

I thought, wow, what a title.

Phantasmagoria.

It was a little sorryless drawing and Phantasmagoria that I remember and then there was another painting.

I thought it was very cute to call up a painting with a French title, so I called it (speaks in foreign language).

So I've got, so I did this rather bracket, like brack and black and mostly black and I called it (speaks in foreign language) and I thought that was great.

Anyhow, it was an exciting time and a wonderful time.

I had a very, a very lovely childhood.

I have to say that.

I really, I have absolutely no bad recollections at all.

All of it was exciting and beautiful and I would not change a moment of it.

(gentle music) I was, actually born and Largs, but we, I moved when I was one years old to Troon, so I was brought up in Troon.

You know, Troon is a little Scottish town on the west coast of Scotland, 40 miles from Glasgow.

I would walk on the Troon beach almost every day.

It's a bit like here, you know, you could walk from miles and not see anyone and as a young boy, I'd always had this great attraction for the ocean.

I would go down there and I'd walk and I would enjoy the gulls, the seagulls and everything.

It was something that grew on me, that became part of me, being by the ocean and when I was, when I'm away from the sea, like when I was in London for 10 years, I always fell out of place.

I always wanted to get back to the ocean, which of course I did when I got to Maine here.

(bright music) When I first came to this country, the thing that struck me most was the landscape.

It was new and so it had quite an impact on me.

So my natural desire was to somehow, not capture visually, but capture the feeling that it gave me, some of the joy.

Yeah, when I first came to Maine, my paintings changed radically because I had this excitement of a new landscape.

So the landscape crept into what I had previously been doing, which was abstracts.

So the landscape I did here were basically recognizable, but slightly abstracted too and, but at the same time as the others were imaginative, they came mostly from feelings and imagination.

(bright music) - The ocean was always there.

He grew up looking at it, just looking at it from right to left instead of left to right.

So I think that was part of his earliest imagery.

There's something about, hmm, there's just something about water, I suppose it's the immensity of it.

It can be overwhelming, but at the same time, it reminds you of how small we are in the universe, which is not such a bad thing to keep in mind.

(gentle bright music) (gentle bright music continues) - When I was at Marr College, I met someone who felt exactly like I did, which was amazing, it's unlikely that ever happened, but I met my friend Bill Crozier and this was at high school and he had the same passion for art as I did and both of us from then on, we would take walks together, we would paint together, I would paint in his shed.

He had a shed out.

His father was a plumber and had a shed in the back garden.

He lived in the working class part of town, 'cause his father was walking the shipyard.

I lived in the other part of town, but we'd get together, I would paint in his shack and he would come and paint in my attic.

So we did a lot of painting together and actual fact, we had our first exhibition ever was at a tea room in Troon and then we went on, this is why we were still at Marr College, we had an exhibition and then we had an exhibition in the town of Ayr, the the capital of Ayrshire and we had a town at the Carnegie, the Carnegie Library and it was opened by an important person living.

It was quite a step up for two young boys who had actually, basically no training, but just a passion for art.

Of course, from that point in on, we went to the Glasgow School of Art.

We graduated from, we graduated in art from Marr College and actual fact, he got first prize, I got second prize.

Well, I didn't mind that, so we both won in our year for art and he was first, I second, but that was okay.

We tried.

(laughs) But anyway, so naturally we both went to the Glasgow School of Art after, after Marr College.

What was going on in London at that time, it was very lively place Soho, very lively.

It was a wonderful gathering of famous people in Downing house, no one had any money, but everybody seemed to end up drunk.

The most famous place there at that time was a place called the Colony Club.

The Colony Club was a place where after the regular pubs closed, people could go there and drink and it was a favorite place of Francis Bacon.

He would go there with his entourage and it was run by a woman called Muriel Belcher.

She was an incredibly weird character too.

She swore like a trooper and she wouldn't let anyone in that she didn't like and she said a lot nasty things about people and people were afraid off of her generally, but if you got past the door and you're fine and got into the club and that was a center for a lot of people, a lot of well known people like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud and people out there would go and drink there.

Soho that time, there were a lot of drinking establishments.

There were some betting shops and there were a lot of hookers, you know, and you're walking down a street to get to a pub, there would be, a hooker with appear in the doorway and ask you to come in and you had to get past all of that before he got to the pub, so it was a very colorful era, to say the least.

There was a large group of gay people and their supporters, the people who helped to promote them were also gay, publishers and critics who helped to make the names were also part of that gay community.

It wasn't entirely so, Bill and I were not, maybe they thought we were because we were good companions, but anyhow, we were accepted into the group.

(chilled jazz music) At the time, it was an incredibly colorful, exciting place.

More than, I can think of who are like it today.

That was Soho.

There's so many interesting people.

Most of them, most of them died young.

Some of them committed suicide or they drank themselves to death.

By the time we left, a lot of those people we had known had died or had, or I had less to do with them because I was married.

I often went with my wife to Soho.

She wasn't really into all that.

It's a good place for people who are single rather than married.

You didn't have responsibilities and most of the people who inhabited Soho had no responsibilities whatsoever.

They were irresponsible in the extreme.

So once we got married, we saw less of Soho and things changed, Soho changed quite a bit.

(chilled jazz music) (romantic music) When I was living in London and I had met and married my first wife, Stephanie, I was interested in filming at that time and I had the opportunity to buy 60 millimeter Bolex and we were reading his letters and I don't know if you ever read Van Gogh's letters, but they're very, very informative, very beautiful.

My late wife and I were reading those letters and we thought wouldn't it be great to film the Van Gogh area and for commentary, use the letters and being very ambitious at the time, we thought the perfect person to read them would be a Burton.

So we thought Richard Burton.

So well that's great, we've got Van Gogh's letters and we'll ask Richard Burton to read them and we'll go and film.

You know, it sounded like a wonderful idea, you know, and I've got the camera, the trouble is, I soon have realized that a reel of film, 'cause 60 millimeter, a reel of film cost at that time, three pounds, three pounds in those days was quite a lot of money and that lasted for something like three minutes, a film, something like that and I thought, you know, I mean this is really gonna get costly.

(bright music ends) (whimsical music) We drove down to South France and we started filming.

There were people picking grapes, french ladies with their straw hats and picking grapes and that was a start and I was just getting into it and of course there were times my finger was in front of the lens and (laughs) it was really terrible.

(mid-tempo music) The one good thing had happened, and I don't know if you saw 'em there, but one good thing was that we decided to go to Tarascon where Van Gogh went to to the asylum there.

It was, as you say, a hospital, at that time it was a hospital run by nuns and we thought we'd go on at least film around that area, but when we got there, we realized that it was being demolished by a group of Italian walkers, 'cause we were, when we got there, we could see the, listen to the Italians, they're all sitting around having lunch, talking Italian and we thought, wow, you know, the nuns have gone.

Maybe we could get inside, so we did.

the workers didn't see her, they were all sitting together.

We went around the garden, got in through another gate, got into the asylum itself, the hospital asylum and I photographed parts of the grounds of the asylum where the wall was, it appears in several of his paintings the wall around the Saint-Remy Asylum and I got into the area of where they kept people behind bars when they were really out of their minds and I know Van Gogh for a period of time was locked up behind bars and so I got to one of those cells and it was wonderful because through the barred window, you could see olive trees and it was so Van Gogh, you know?

And so I filmed that and when I got home and looked at everything I had, I was not nearly enough to make a movie and the cost was getting too much and I thought one day I'll put it all together, but I never did.

I just kept that raw footage and still have it.

We would live in London in a small bed sitter, she was getting a newspaper from the States and saw this ad for a farmhouse in Maine with a hundred acres for $4,000.

So in spur of the moment, we decided to pack up and leave and I think within a week we had given up our jobs, packed everything we had, we traveled in great style across Atlantic on the SSU United States.

(somber music) When we went to see this place that was advertised, it was out by Skowhegan and it was April, actually, it was April, I remember.

When we got to Skowhegan, there was snow on the ground.

It was so miserable looking, there was snow everywhere and this building, when we got to it was an old Maine farmhouse, and it looked like the roof was giving away and we just decided without getting outta the car, having traveled all this way, we didn't even get outta the car, we said, "Drive on, let's drive on."

We're not going, not even gonna consider this place.

It was a dream, suddenly came to and abrupt end, but we ended up late at night in Milbridge and so we went to a store, or the store that was open there, and we asked, was it anywhere where we could stay?

Was a hotel or anything?

And they said there wasn't a hotel in town, but then she knew someone who has an A-frame on the water and they rent it out, and it's April, I'm sure you couldn't have it.

So she called up this person and said, "Fine, they can use it" and then at night, it was dark at night.

I remember going down to Tom Layton point, it was on the water, next morning I got up and went onto the deck and I can't tell you how beautiful it was.

It was the most beautiful morning I've ever had in Maine.

The sun was shining from a cloudless sky, not a breath of wind.

There were lobster was churning offshore.

You could listen to that lovely noise of the engines, gulls squawking, I thought, this is paradise.

I'm never leaving Maine and I never have.

(gentle music) When I get that feeling of getting ready and have a vague notion of what I want to do, I start painting.

The painting itself, I know from the beginning will never turn out the way I imagined it to, because it's going to evolve in its own organic state.

It'll grow in its own way.

I am like a vehicle to it.

I am merely holding the brush, but is it, the painting is beginning to determine what's going to, how it's going to end up.

So a painting which I start will very often change multiple times during the course of painting, until it finally settles in what it wants to be, not so much what I want it to be, to a certain extent, of course that's why I want it to be, but a painting will determine whether it is right or wrong on its own, you know?

And you can tell at some point in the painting, you can say, yes, it's a, it expresses what I wanted to express.

It's there on its own.

I don't have to touch it.

It lives, it lives now on the canvas.

It's a process and it's a journey for you are led rather than you're leading, you are led and eventually you get to where you wanna go or you don't, you know, and sometimes you just get lost, less so now than before, because now I know the terrain better so that wherever I go, I've got a better knowledge of arriving.

(gentle music) You know, it's like, well, Picasso expressed it perfectly when he says, "I do not seek, I find" and that to me is true.

You don't seek, you find.

Good art, great art is discovery, you know, and it's a very rare thing, you know, and I'm not saying that I can do it.

I try to do it, is all I can say, I try to find, but that to me that, all great art is a discovery and all great art lives on its own.

You can look at a Cezanne or Van Gogh or Rembrandt, and it's is fresh and lively and important as the day it was painted.

It exists no different from the day it was painted.

It has that strength and life that it had given, you know, by whoever created it.

It's still there strong as ever and that to me is a great work of art.

(gentle music) An artist who is able to communicate with another person is communicating his, what he feels through his senses.

He's communicating that, but maybe in that sense is autobiographical.

It's all to do with your, what it is that makes you spiritually alive.

How you feel alive at this moment, at this time and you can, and a onlooker can tap into that and get the experience that person had.

You know, that's, it's that ability to transmit how you feel to a onlooker and how we can react to this, that is important or not, it's not just something pretty you hang up.

(somber music) Going back to the Van Gogh, when he stood in front of those waving trees and felt the wind in his face, you can feel that wind, you can see that tree, you can be there, you can feel exactly how Van Gogh felt when he set up his easel to paint it, he brought you right into his senses, into his whole spiritual being.

That to me is great art, when you can do that, when a painter can do that for you and that's when you know you've done a successful painting when the painting tells you, "Leave me alone, I'm a living thing" and it is.

(somber music) Her mother died of breast cancer, so there was a history of breast cancer in the family.

It still came, of course, as a terrible shock when she had a test and found that she had breast cancer.

We were living in Blue Hill at the time.

We went to the doctor's in Bangor and he suggested with surgery she'd be all right.

So she went to Boston, had surgery, it seemed fine now, but less than two years passed when she got ill again, (poignant music) she died within about four months of the second occurrence.

(poignant music) I couldn't stay in Maine after what had happened.

I did actually go back and stayed with my mother and father for about two months and I realized even though I was home, it was my home town, Troon, I realized that this was not my place, it wasn't for me, that I had left my life in Maine and I had to return there.

It was where I had to paint and where I had to continue my life again.

So after two months of being in Britain, I came back to Maine and I continued living in Blue Hill.

I was working very hard.

I had several galleries and shows going on and that kept me from, well, from from breaking down.

I kept working and my painting was my crutch and then the painting was what really saw me through that terrible time.

(poignant music) - William Irvine's style of art is based in expressionism.

So he isn't interested in representation, he's more interested in the feeling that, or the emotion that somebody's gonna respond to when they look at his work.

He doesn't get rid of representational objects completely.

It's important to Bill that he keeps them in there to bring his audience in.

There's enough reality so that his interpretation is believable.

He's getting rid of the logic, you know?

'Cause when you get focused on the logic, you're not in touch with your emotions.

That's what his goal is in making his paintings and he's mentioned that famous quote before about how the principle of art is not to portray, but to evoke and that's really the basis of what all his painting is about.

- A friend knew that I was interested in playing poker and said, oh, you gotta join Bill and Marge in a local friendly poker game and that was about 20 years ago, so we became poker buddies.

Bill is a very good poker player, and I learned a lot just by playing with him and it's probably more about the great food and the camaraderie than it actually is the card.

It took us about two or three years of making work together before we actually got some finished pieces that we felt good about.

The process of actually painting on porcelain clay is difficult.

There's reasons historically I think why people use blue and white or very specific colors with ceramics, because they're a little bit easier than others.

Bill's color choices, he wanted access to every color that's in the crayon box, if you will.

- [William] Thinking of Picasso pottering, I thought maybe I could do something like that.

Well, I didn't actually, but that's how we got started.

An interesting, quite exciting addition to what I do, it's not a direct offshoot of my painting.

It's really a kind of addition to my painting.

You have to imagine how it's going to come out because the colors don't come out exactly the way in which you put them on, to change somewhat in the firing.

So you have to have a certain knowledge of how the glaze is going to turn out and sometimes you miscalculate, I did that once, I was a miscalculate once.

I thought I would do it putting on a gray, but when it's fired, it came out a pale green, and it completely and totally ruined my pots as far as I'm concerned, actual fact, some of them sold actually, but I never liked those pots because the green was supposed to be gray and it disturbed the whole color combination for me, but that's what happens, you have to be careful, get to know what you're doing.

- When I really think of what I've contributed to ceramics is I love color and I love glazing, and I get my colors really through the application of one glaze over another, like a clear glaze over an opaque glaze or translucent glazes underneath a transparent glaze.

So I get a lot of depth in my color through my own work.

Bill, you know, he's really going for a real painterly surface on that pot.

So yes, he does challenge me and I've had, (chuckles) he'd love to work larger, large porcelain plates, most of the time when we made really large plates, they've cracked.

It's just not a clay that wants to be big.

It's not that difficult, I think in his world to have canvases that are really big and to, you know, tackle big canvases and ceramics, it's so hard and we lose so many as you incrementally get bigger and Bill does challenge me, but I think of it mostly as in poker (chuckles) than actually making the artwork.

I feel like now we've got a pretty simple way of, you know, getting the things that we need and we're still exploring all the different things that we can do with color and layers of color.

Quite often we do kiln openings with other people present and so, you know, once in a while we get a bad one and kind of like hide it off to the side as it's coming out of the kiln, but there's been no greater joy than to actually share it with people who admire Bill and his work.

You know, the pots come alive in that moment when they come out of the kiln and if we're careful with those pieces, you know, they still could be here 10,000 years from now.

You know, there is a timelessness about the porcelain ceramics that certainly could far outlive any of his paintings.

Those images, unless they get scratched or something on the surface, those images will be a part of Bill's history and certainly my history too.

- Well, it's an extraordinary correspondence, it spans decades.

So the whole time they were separated, they were writing to one another and they would write not only about their work, about their process, about where they were showing, what they were selling, but they would also write about art and what was happening on the art scene and some of the painters that they knew.

It's a really incredible correspondence.

They saw things through the same eyes in a lot of ways and they were very, very close.

(poignant music) - Blue Hill, August the 28th, 1990.

"Dear Bill, I got a fright when I saw your letter headed 'Ban free hospital.'

Please no more letters from hospitals.

Write to me when you're drunk on Andalusian wine, sentimental before a Scottish fire, boisterous in Ballydehob but no more letters from room four.

I want you to live as long as me.

No longer, but as long, but enough of this, we have 10,000 days to live.

A thousand paintings to paint you at least 2000 for your more prolific.

Thank you for the fine catalog.

It was good to see the Troon paintings, the girls of Togs.

I almost heard the Saturday dance music from the town hall.

Moonlight on the shore, shadows under the railway bridge, love and longing, Frida Kahlos, good days at Ballast bank."

(somber music) Blue Hill, January the third, 1984.

"It's late on a summer night with June bogs banging against the dark pens and cries of agony from the woods.

Stephanie is away on a trip and I am by the typewriter with a wee fire and a Pina Colada to water off the damp.

Over here, it is summer again, but haven't yet thought out.

The juices are still to flow.

It's hard to start again, still up, yet energy, which was so easy in those early Scottish days.

A walk by the beach, under a railroad bridge coffee at Togs was all it took.

Last night I thought of an old friend of yours, John Aldous, who once did a rather nice painting of Wales.

I'm having a studio built at my cottage by the sea.

It'll be finished in another two weeks with skylights and all.

There is a single window which looks across the ocean to small islands.

No junk will be permitted.

No temporary refuge for unwanted furniture.

Just a nice clean room with a dancing colors.

There I will do the definitive rooms.

My Ayrshire legacy to Americans.

So how's everything with you?

Send me a letter, a postcard, write me a poem."

(somber music) I do miss him.

I miss him a lot actually.

Not, I miss the letters that we and I miss not write, being able to write to someone about art the way I did with Bill.

You know, we'd always write about our art, you know, to a certain extent what we were doing and that sort of thing, but we wrote about art and I would know exactly what he was doing and he would send me photographs of his work or catalogs.

I have several catalogs that he sent me, he even sent me a tea towel with my name on it, but anyhow, so I do miss not having someone that I can write about art, about my paintings and of course his paintings through me.

He had a big opening, I don't know if I mentioned this other, but the last time I saw him, he had a opening in London at a major gallery, the Flowers Gallery and he asked me if I would go over to the opening and I did and there was a marvelous opening and I met some of the friends that he knew that I hadn't seen in a long time and afterwards we went to the Groucho Marx, the Groucho Marx Club in London, which is well known for its famous people and so I had a marvelous several days in London with him.

Then as I say, then I left and never got back to London because I lost my passport, couldn't get over.

Even when he was dying I would've gone over, but I couldn't do that.

So anyhow, that was, that was that.

(somber music) This is Blue Hill, January the second, 2008.

"Dear Bill, just a note to wish you and Catherine a happy new year.

How time has flown since I saw you both in London and for a grand time I had being with you during those eventful days, seeing Joe again and sharing in the fun.

Your book arrived a few weeks ago.

I have spent many days pouring over it.

It is a grand book, finesse and the best reproduction of color I have seen in an art book.

That photo of you with the paintings in front of your shed in Troon brought back so much to me of those earlier days when we were just beginning.

I loved those paintings.

Women gathering sea coal, girl in Togs Cafe.

They are not massive species, but they do contain all the excitement of someone who has discovered the mystery of art.

The alchemy to change life into shapes and colors.

It's all there, the genesis of a life's obsession.

We are having the snowiest winter ever here.

It has snowed every day in December and the bloody landscape looks like a grand mimosa.

My studio window is blinkered in snow.

I've lost my wood pile.

The cat won't go out and has threatened suicide unless I bring the grass back, which won't be until April.

On the other hand, this confinement has produced a burst of energy in my painting.

New ideas, getting away from the constraints of familiar and comfortable subjects.

I'm not sure where all this is leading, but it feels right and at my extreme age, I can do whatever I like.

None of this makes much sense unless I send you photos, but I will in time.

It is this exploration of that personal mythology that defines us.

For us, who've been painting over half a century, there is no such thing as originality.

We rework our poems to make them clearer.

That's why Crozier's are so easily recognized, even when they appear upside down in auction catalogs, an early Essex landscape for instance.

What I mean is though all the work is original to others, to ourselves, we cannot change."

(somber music) The thing about a thing that's outta reach is that that final painting you never reach, it's always out of reach.

All you can do is try to reach it, that's the process of painting.

No artist in his right mind will ever do the perfect painting and stop painting, 'cause that's it.

It's a search for the perfect painting that keeps an artist going, all artists going.

It's that, it's a search that's important, you know, wanting to get there, but knowing you'll never get there, because you're always looking for that painting beyond the one you're doing.

Every artist is born with a small set of poems and it's the exploration of that personal mythology that defines him as an artist and I feel that real artists are born with a certain number of things they wish to express.

Perhaps their own personality, their own take on life.

They have that and it's very personal and you can explore, an artist like that can explore as many wild thoughts and ideas as possible, but he's always confined to those personal poems that he was born with.

You cannot go outside yourself completely, no matter how much you try.

You'll always be yourself as a painter.

If you're a good painter, you will be true to yourself always.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (lively music) (lively music continues)