Craola USA
Greg 'Craola' Simkins brings the viewer into his personal mythology by depicting beloved cartoon characters from the mid and late 20th century, childhood fairy tales, and American commercial imagery mixed with urban graffiti aesthetics.
The result is striking and beautiful paintings that evoke nostalgic memories of Sunday mornings eating sweet breakfast cereal whilst watching cartoons. This narrative unites a collective consciousness of bittersweet innocence. He combines recognizable cultural elements using dream logic across his compositions, a direct inheritance from surrealism's emphasis on dream states.
Craola tells modern, complex adult fairy tales while retaining a youthful, playful, and sarcastic tone.
Craola is a native Californian living and working in the South Bay.
Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins was born in 1975 in Torrance California, just south of Los Angeles. He grew up with a menagerie of animals including a number of rabbits, which often emerge in his paintings. He began drawing at the early age of three and was inspired by various cartoons and books. Some standout books that still find their way into his art are Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.
Simkins’ art continued to progress to the age of 18, when he started doing graffiti under the name ‘CRAOLA’. Graffiti art became his impetus for creating and gave him the confidence to paint large works. In addition it taught him perspective, color theory and further developed his artistic skills, which later translated into his work with acrylics.
After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from California State University of Long Beach in 1999, Simkins worked as an illustrator for various clothing companies and bands. He later moved on to Treyarch/Activision where he worked on video games including Tony Hawk 2X, Spiderman 2 and Ultimate Spiderman while attempting to paint with every free moment he had.
In 2005, Simkins pursued his desire to paint as a full-time artist. Since then, he has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and has successfully sold out solo exhibitions. The growing popularity and demand for Simkins’ artwork has gained the recognition of many and can be found in a variety of private collections.
It is his careful weaving of pop culture, the old masters, nature, carnival kitsch, and (most importantly) his warped imagination, that makes Greg Simkins a sought-after surrealist painter today. Simkins’ artwork has appeared in museums and galleries throughout the world.