Planetary Alignment over the Tinzerhorn

Russell Crotty is a Los Angeles based contemporary artist known for his intricate drawings. He earned a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1978 and an MFA at the University of California, Irvine in 1980. "Planetary Alignment over the Tinzerhorn" belongs to a body of work inspired by astronomy. From a backyard observatory he constructed from plywood, corrugated steel, and tarpaulin, he encounters and records the night sky. His drawings are not precise or literal transliterations of the view through his telescope, but rather documents of the effect observing the vastness of the universe has upon the artist. “It’s not so much that these drawings have a foundation in reality as that they have an experience in reality” he has said. Incorporated into the drawings are areas of text, which range from the poetic (fragments of books and poems he has read) to the mundane (“snippets of radio talk-show chatter”). Inscribed at the bottom section of this composition, composing a segment of earth that anchors the sky above, is the phrase “Planetary Alignment over the Tinzerhorn” (the work’s title) repeated over and over. The Tinzerhorn is a peak in the Swiss Alps.