Lindsay
Crooks Dunedin
Artist 1957 - 2005
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Sadly
passed away after an 8 month battle with cancer in 2005. New Zealand figurative artist Lindsay Crooks was a significant and important "artist of the people".
We have a list of new and older work from his collection plus copies
of the book "Venus on the Beach Towel". We also have
signed original pastels, smaller framed original oils and prints on
canvas and paper.
"A teacher of life drawing for twenty years, Lindsay Crooks'
main subject as an artist is the human figure. His people are buoyant,
jolly, life-affirming figures - their chunky body shapes worked into
careful compositions which celebrate ordinary things, ordinary pleasures
and the everyday world. He is a prolific and genial talent, refusing
to use photographs, prefering to draw from life and rearranging what
he sees to suit his own stylistic mannerisms. To view
Lindsay Crooks' bold and spirited paintings is to be absorbed into
the fullness of New Zealand life, from social gatherings on the beach,
to the working class heroes of provincial life, to iconic historical
figures and early European settlers who made their first initial footfalls
on this land. Lindsay Crooks paints life as a kind of incessant activity.
His paintings are full of movement. Figures walk with a rolling sailor's
gait, or they dance, flex, stride, saunter, or they hurtle along on
bicycles, dive down to seabeds and engage in frenetic beach activities.
As well as the artist as part of a community he is the artist as part
of a family. Some of his most charming works explores the human comedy
of domestic life and invests the small objects of daily life with
both simple magic and comic dignity. He notices things: steam from
a kettle, a cat curled up, a vase of flowers, the way snow fluoresces,
the ocean view through an open door. Looking then drawing is a habitual
response to a keenly observed attitude to everyday life. Perhaps the
primal site for Crook's studies of the figure is the beachscape. New
Zealanders have an intense relationship with the beach and it is here
that Lindsay flexes his full animastic muscle combined with a signature
knack for balanced colours and shapes and the Crooks Muse - a fleshy
voluptuous Rubensesque Venus all curves and curls, rosy with sun,
maybee nursing a baby or coaxing a toddler along.It is through this
simple mastery of colour and shape that Lindsay Crooks manages to
enrich each work with a celebration of life, an appreciation of ordinary
existence, and an acknowledgement of inherant differences in the human
form that makes each one uniquely appealing." excerpts taken
from the book "Venus on a Beach Towel" published
by Longacre Press
A short list of exhibitions:
1990 Carnegie Gallery, Dunedin
1991 Port Chalmers Aero Club Gallery, Dunedin Moray Gallery, Dunedin,
Cambridge Gallery, Cambridge
1992 Stanley Street Gallery, Auckland, Southland Museum & Art
Gallery, Invercargill ( Celebrating the New Zealand worker)
1993 Lakes District Museum, Arrowtown Carnegie Gallery, Dunedin Mrgan
Le Fay Gallery Auckland, CSA Gallery Christchurch
1994 Gisbourne Museum & Arts Centre, Salamander Gallery, Christchurch,
Page 90 Gallery, Porirua
1995 Art worlks, Wanaka Lakes District Museum, Arrowtown, Taupo District
Museum
1996 Salamander Gallery, Christchurch
1997 Bond Street Gallery, Dunedin Salamander Gallery, Christchurch
Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru
1998 Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland
1999 Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Invercargill ( Immigrant Series)
2000 Forrester Gallery, Oamaru Acanthus Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK
Neville Studios, Dunedin
2001 South Seas Gallery, Brighton, Dunedin, Art by the Sea Gallery,
Devonport, Auckland Turnbill House, Wellington
2002 Neville Studios, Dunedin Otago Museum, Dunedin
2003 Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland 2004 Colour, Clay,
Canvas Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland |
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