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Jeremy Crabtree is a self-taught painter from the Pacific Northwest. He was born and raised in the country outside of Seattle and moved to Los Angeles in 2002. He needed to feel the desert and the energy surrounding the sea, and that small need soon became inspiration for a new medium. He began painting with collage using his own photographs and found objects picked up at various jobs and excursions. This hobby took on a life of it’s own and he soon began painting everything and with anything he could get his hands on, transposing hobby to complete passion.
With time the skill caught up with the ideas and he began realizing his true calling was to paint some of the dreams of his youth inspired by the landscape of his childhood homes and surroundings, juxtaposed with his new desert environment and its strangely plastic façade called LA.
Growing up in the woods is an all-encompassing tonic. The surface world in which we live is in so many ways an illusion and it seems that dreams are tied to nature whether consciously known or not. Being a part of its power is a gift forever kept and cherished for all who are a part of it.
His paintings represent all that is lost in translation between language and visceral experience. They exist to evoke in the viewer some of the questions of the ages: Where are we? Who are we? Where is God? Why do we do as we do? How do we truly find ourselves?
Questions are better than answers. Mystery and knowledge seem to lie in their mere existence. Jeremy sees his role as one who needs to dig and he searches to find the questions lurking under every aspect of his life. The more we question, the more we think and feel for ourselves, for the benefit of all beings.
Living in Los Angeles is a notoriously complex experience and seems appropriate as a fertile ground for the vibrant and virile paintings in which Jeremy produces. Restless spirits and pseudo geniuses rub elbows with cave-dwellers and superstars. Could you ask for anything more for inspiration?
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