James Croak is an American-born artist concentrating on sculpture and photography. Additionally Croak writes and publishes widely on art and cultural criticism. His art and writings appear in over thirty books.
Croak works in series, often in unusual materials such as cast dirt, resulting in several popular groups: the Dirt Baby editions, the Dirt Man series, and Window series.
Many of his unique pieces are animal-human hybrids which he started making in 1979 and shown here as the “beasts.”
A series of Croak’s drawings updates Fancisco Goya’s “Disasters of War” (Los Desastres de la Guerra 1810-20) with wars that have occurred since. He employs the same central image with a coy title on the image as did Goya. The works are drawn with mud on paper, the common conclusion of the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to.
New Skins for the Coming Monstrosities are appliances to extend our thin skin, and designed to protect us from the environmental insult found in modern times.
A recent project is the night landscape photographs entitled “The Other Twelve Hours” and includes shots as varied as the Arashiyama bamboo grove of Kyoto, the everglades in Florida and the Sonoran desert of Arizona.