Roger Lynn Crossgrove was a painter, photographer, teacher and father. His artwork in diverse media shows a breadth of approach and a remarkable sense of color and line. This site is a tribute to his art and his legacy. The Crossgrove family is happy to be able to share this artwork with a larger audience.
Roger's work as a teacher, collector and enthusiast of children's literature, and his vibrant presence in local and regional arts activities has left a long and rich legacy. For more information about Crossgrove's history, context and accomplishments, see his Biography. Peruse the galleries, sorted by mediums. Learn more detail about Crossgrove's Techniques on that page.
To see periodic postings of Roger's artworks, follow rogerlcrossgrove on Instagram.
Crossgrove worked in several seemingly unrelated media, at different periods. He is best known for the watercolor monotype or monoprint, a technique he first used in the 1950s, and which he developed and explored for several decades. His secondary area of exploration was photography. During an earlier period, he developed a personal style with floral compositions in richly colored pastel. Crossgrove's experimental approach shows in these images as a gentle drift between abstract, figurative, and gestural forms.
Subjects that recur in Crossgrove's work are floral compositions, botanical cross-sections, male nudes, athletic figures, hearts and pears, and assorted still life arrangements. Two threads connect the diverse works: an adventurous sense of color, and a command of line or gesture. Not random, yet not slavishly mimetic, Crossgrove's quality of line shows a sophisticated sense of composition and focus. His daring color sense produced a number of pieces whose color range is explosive, but he had an intuitive sense for combining colors.
A recurring quality in the photographs, pastels and monotypes is a free drift between the literal, and the hazy and intuitive qualities we might associate with dreams. Many of the pastels and monotypes show recognizable subject matter, yet their representations can be at once vague, emphatic, specific and dreamlike. Collectors of Crossgrove's work describe the unusual delight they find in visually meandering over his works, in a meditative, intuitive way, the eye simultaneously stimulated and calmed. The unfocused quality in each of the media tends to prompt curiosity, fascination, and contemplation. Roger Crossgrove's work spanned decades, from his earliest ventures in painting and pastel in the 1940's, to his extended explorations of photography and watercolor monotype into the 21st century.