L. Croskey - Cuttin’ It Close (The Doghouse Gallery)
Artist Bio / Statement:
One wouldn’t think that a collage artist, working with glue and paper would have once been bombing the streets of LA. But back in the 80’s Leonard Croskey known to everyone as LC, used to go by the name King Kaoski and ran with Pasadena graffiti crew, IBM: Images Beyond Mentality. This once strictly street art man then stretched his creative palate and turned to fashion and studied design for two years. This love for design is how the graffiti artist and fashion designer turned into a collage artist. LC’s art combines graffiti’s movement and color with the design and pattern making of fashion. Collage is the creative outlet that brings his two different talents together and produces a new kind of image. An image with clean tight lines that reflect those of the modern digital arts with a graffiti bounce, except LC leaves the computer behind. And lets paper, glue and scissors be the means to an artistic end. Inspired by vintage pin up art, design, and advertising, LC creates a world of imagination, a very distinct world of his own, an image that reflects a metaphor or fantasy or delusion, a false paradise. By using magazines and books ranging from vintage pin up to children’s books and numerous others, he takes these classic beauties and other collected images and places them in a modern design setting. Years of collected wrapping paper, wallpaper, scrap booking paper and magazines are the materials LC uses to build this girl inspired world, luring you in to find out that the story might actually be saying more than what it may have initially alluded to. LC’s art is a diary of emotions from his past and the lessons he has learned from these various, funny, sometimes dark relationships, and sometimes just good old fashioned sex.
