About - Artist Bio

Lindsay Cronk is a self-taught American artist whose unique and whimsical creations have earned her numerous awards and accolades in the field of naive art. Exploding with candy colors and often including unusual composition, Lindsay’s work captures the joy and wonder of everyday life in a way that is both playful and sophisticated.

Completely self taught, Lindsay Cronk loves to work in the naive style using expressive childlike character depictions to create emotional compositions that feel accessible and light at first glance but that deal, using wit and sarcasm, with heavy topics like her past struggles with mental illness, evolving feminist thought and religion and history, always turning ancient notions and traditional wisdom sideways for a new look.

Lindsay's art is characterized by its childlike simplicity and whimsy, featuring bright colors, bold lines, and playful subjects. She is obsessed with stories in all forms - theology, mythology, fairytales and personal stories dominate her canvases. She uses animals, symbols and comical characters to convey the universal messages that touch all of our lives - joy, pain, bravery, fear, connectedness, emptiness, metamorphosis, stagnation, mental health and mental anguish.

Raised in southern California by a professor and psychologist, Lindsay developed a love for art at the young age of four years old, spending countless hours at the Los Angeles LACMA with her mother wandering room to room and memorizing the paintings of her favorites such as Klee, Kandinsky and Miro. As a youth, she soaked up the classical art of the Greeks and the Renaissance on travels with her dad’s classes abroad and she studied art history at university. It wasn’t until after a career in investment banking however, and an intense bout of psychosis that she discovered her love of painting for herself. 

Lindsay honed her skills through practice and self-discovery, eventually turning her passion into a successful career and winning many awards for her efforts. Despite her success, Lindsay remains committed to her roots as a self-taught artist, constantly experimenting and exploring new techniques and ideas in her work. She continues to inspire others with her passion and dedication, reminding us that anyone can achieve greatness with a little bit of talent and a lot of hard work.

A story teller at heart, Lindsay’s paintings enable her to express the common themes that tie us together as human beings.

View recent original works in the PAINTINGS section or peruse the PRINTS section for older works that can now be exquisitely reproduced onto archival papers, acrylic, wood and even metal. The NFTs section showcases Linday’s NFT offerings currently available on Opensea at CronkArt.

About - Artist Statement

As an artist, my work is first and foremost inspired by story in all forms. After that, I strive to capture the whimsy and playfulness that is often overlooked in the mundane, finding beauty in the unexpected, even dark places of the human experience. 

My mental illness informs most of my work and as a self-taught artist my work fully embodies the term “art brut” (the self-taught artwork of the mentally ill), though I do not like to be in anybody’s box. I am attracted to the naive style because I like the paradox of naivete against hard topics like mental illness, religious intolerance and close mindedness and the stories humans tell and retell themselves in their quest to understand who we are and the world around us.

Nature and animals are among my favorite subjects, and I love to experiment with different techniques and styles to create pieces that are both vibrant and unique. I want to create art that brings a smile to people's faces, evoking a sense of wonder and joy in the viewer, but I also want my work to speak to the ridiculous and the beautiful. And though it is never my goal, I do not shy away from topics or themes that provoke.

My paintings are characterized by their bright colors, bold lines, and childlike simplicity and I never strive for accuracy or realism in the marks and lines I place onto canvas: I can not draw with accuracy and I don’t want to. But the messages within the work I do care about, and they are often serious and meant to offer new ways of thinking about old topics.

As a self-taught artist, I am constantly learning and growing, never content to remain stagnant or complacent in my work. I expect my work to continually change, renew and evolve. I am inspired by the world around me, by music, pop culture, fashion, religion, all types of art and peoples and I strive to create pieces that reflect the beauty in the pain of life and the magic I see in the everyday.

One of the gifts of my mental illness is “voices” and mine offer suggestions constantly on topics I should take on, or new techniques to mess around with, even giving me input while I’m working. My invisible, talkative muses. Often I do not know what a painting is saying until I have finished with it.

End of the day, I am a white, mentally ill, American woman living in this day and age, and my work comes from that point of view and experience. I paint only for myself and am not interested in what anyone else considers “good art” or in making art that is currently “in style”. My art is about the things that bother me, light me up or make me ponder. It is personal and the act of painting is a solitary one, but connecting to the world through my work is the only way I know how to understand who I am.

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