Brian Cronin
As the style of this New York illustrator evolves, one thing remains constant–his commitment to self- expression.
By Tiffany Meyers
Whatever our professions, we are all linked to the tools of our trades. But illustrator Brian Cronin is inextricably, physically so. At a recent breakfast meeting at a lower east side café in New York, he describes his connection to his materials in corporeal terms. Cronin recently undertook the arduous process of shifting from the pen, which he’d used for years, to brushes and acrylic paint.
“It was like sawing off my leg,” he says, delivering the characteristically hyperbolic statement with the Irish brogue that skims every word.
In a self-portrait for Print, Cronin depicts himself kneeling before a sheet of paper. His form is human, but for his head, which morphs from his shoulders into a tube of paint. This he squeezes with his hands, issuing forth a stream of pigment that collects in a heap on the floor in the shape of a brain.
It’s as if, for Cronin, the distinction between the paint he uses to express his thoughts and the thoughts themselves dissolves.
For all that, the image is comedic. This is, after all, a man squeezing his brains out….
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The complete article, in CA’s 2006 March/April Issue, is available to subscribers at Communication Arts.
