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Lindsay Crooks – Self Portrait in Landscape

$3,500.00

Title: Self Portrait in Landscape
Artist: Lindsay Crooks
Material: Mixed Media
Oil Size: 120cm x 88.5cm
Frame Size: 124cm x 92.2cm
Year: 1977
Conditions: General

Titled on the back “Self Portrait in Landscape” by the late artist Lindsay Crooks. Dated on back 1977 on label.

Large work and measures W 124 x H 92 cm including frame.

Mixed media – acrylic and collage on board as detailed on the back.

In original frame with details on back.

As the photos show the work is “tired”, could do with a good clean, has several marks with some chips in the paint.

From a very early period in the artist career.

Description

Author’s background:

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