There’s no missing an Alf Crossley painting, particularly if it’s one of his heavily-treed oils. The canvas is so filled with the explosion of trunks and branches and leaves that one feels almost trapped by the landscape and the colour. Some of his canvases have a hundred stems or a thousand leaves intertwined and connected.

These patterns are clearly evident in Crossley’s current show (running until Nov. 9th) at the Kootenay Gallery.

The show takes over both the small and large gallery spaces and inundates the viewer. You feel you have stepped into the middle of a forest, and you may never get out.

At this show, you will also discover the new Crossley in his lake paintings inspired by Slocan Lake. Here you will feel as if you’re floating in the middle of the lake and may never reach shore.

The way Crossley paints is to spend time in the outdoors with his canvases about him and to return home with several new works nearly complete. He paints en plein air, in essence completely immersed in nature—body and soul on the lake, mind and hand in the forest. So it’s no wonder nature leaps out at us.

Nature — but it is nature as he selects it. Each painting is an emotionally-felt connection as much as a reflection of the actuality in front of him. This is most true of his forest scenes.

It’s amazing how close he takes us to the clearings and the glades and overwhelms us with colour — the bleeding blues on branches and the yellows of sunlight filtered. Sometimes it feels as if the trees are “in your face”— to use a current expression.

However, if the viewer steps back across the room, the trunks take on definite shape, valley ridge outlines re-focus, and mountains separate from sky. “Sunburst Forest” is a perfect example—too close, the colours blend, but step away, and it’s like following a trail through the woods in diffused light.

In 2002, Crossley apparently took his canoe and canvases to Slocan Lake. Several paintings in the show are from different lake perspectives, but interestingly, these paintings are more naturalistic than his others. When one is drifting in one’s canoe along one of the most astonishing lakes anywhere, perhaps it’s difficult to be abstract.

“Slocan Lake Morning” easily takes me into my own Slocan Lake canoe trips. I’m with him as he finds hints of purple colour along the shoreline and striations of pale yellow on distant valley walls and on the water itself.

Another facet of the work shown at the Gallery is Crossley’s interest in the abstract. Several paintings such as “Dream Shore Totems” have a few shards or fragments seemingly floating along a shore. Exactly what they are is left for us to figure out.

Each viewer may see something different as in a Rorschach—this being Crossley’s version. As he says, my work “provides the viewer with only enough clues to enable a process of continued exploration.”

And what an exploration that is! Every painting asks us to experience the outdoors, to get involved in visual sensations, and to lose ourselves in the landscape. For example, in “After the Garden,” red swatches of colour woven into an astonishing array of stems and vines rivet you to the spot. You simply stand there and say “wow”.

From the few pencil and ink drawings shown here to the vibrant colour-laden forests, mountains, streams, and gardens, Crossley makes us aware we’re in the presence of a superb nature artist. His display of genuine art is worth an afternoon of your time.