Bio
I like to paint things going on around me. I don’t use photographs; everything’s based on what I’ve seen.
Lindsay Crooks was an iconic fine artist based in Brighton, Dunedin. He was known for his bright, colourful scenes of people enjoying typical NZ outdoor activities like surfing, fishing, and gardening. Around Dunedin and nationally, Lindsay was known as an ‘artist of the people.’ The following are excerpts taken from poet David Eggleton’s introduction to the book Venus on a Beach Towel (Longacre Press, 2003) about Lindsay and his art:
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.
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…
He 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.
Perhaps the primal site for Crook's studies of the figure is the beachscape… In a typical beach painting […] we will see children running towards the water, which will be alive with surfers and swimmers. Family groups will be picnicking. Teenagers gambol and frolic. The figures are solid, anchored, grounded. They grow out of the spaces they inhabit, indeed, they may be almost submerged in their surroundings: semi-transparent, camouflaged. And there is, as always, the signature knack for balanced colours and shapes—of sand tones and sea tones, of boardriders and sandsitters. Things happen in a blaze of light.
Lindsay sadly passed away in 2005 after an 8-month battle with cancer.
We have a list of Lindsay’s work that we are selling on behalf of private collections. These include signed original pastels, smaller framed original oils, and prints on canvas and paper.
A short list of Linday's exhibitions:
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1990 Carnegie Gallery, Dunedin
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1991 Port Chalmers Aero Club Gallery, Dunedin Moray Gallery, Dunedin, Cambridge Gallery, Cambridge
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1992 Stanley Street Gallery, Auckland, Southland Museum & Art Gallery, Invercargill ( Celebrating the New Zealand worker)
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1993 Lakes District Museum, Arrowtown Carnegie Gallery, Dunedin Mrgan Le Fay Gallery Auckland, CSA Gallery Christchurch
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1994 Gisbourne Museum & Arts Centre, Salamander Gallery, Christchurch, Page 90 Gallery, Porirua
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1995 Art works, Wanaka Lakes District Museum, Arrowtown, Taupo District Museum
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1996 Salamander Gallery, Christchurch
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1997 Bond Street Gallery, Dunedin Salamander Gallery, Christchurch Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru
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1998 Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland
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1999 Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Invercargill ( Immigrant Series)
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2000 Forrester Gallery, Oamaru Acanthus Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK Neville Studios, Dunedin
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2001 South Seas Gallery, Brighton, Dunedin, Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland Turnbill House, Wellington
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2002 Neville Studios, Dunedin Otago Museum, Dunedin
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2003 Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland
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2004 Colour, Clay, Canvas Art by the Sea Gallery, Devonport, Auckland