Chris Cropper has drawn for as long as he can remember, filling his grade school notebooks with sketches and doodling endlessly in the margins of his textbooks. The year he spent at CCAD, he transformed one class text into a cover-to-cover work of art, plastering every page with paintings of past classmates, colorful imagined characters and wild, surreal scenes.

Early on, Cropper, used to strive for flawlessness, growing frustrated when a brush stroke felt off, or if his hand couldn’t quite recreate the image as pristinely as he envisioned it in his mind. A turning point arrived in the late 1990s when Cropper’s high school art teacher cautioned him against the impossibility of perfection.

Artist Statment:

"My artwork is influenced by street art and graffiti and explores the human experience and our place in society. The characters in my paintings are everyday people trying to make sense/live in an often confusing and apathetic world. They go about their daily routines with a sense of despair with some hope mixed in. The juxtaposition of found materials is incorporated to afford the viewer a way of noticing things that go unnoticed/discarded much like people. Life is hard, but there is always hope.

I got into art way back in the 80’s and early 90’s when I was still a kid. At 18 as a senior in high school I got an art scholarship to the Columbus college of art and design and dropped out after a semester because the formal training and environment wasn’t for me. In 2002, I discovered graffiti and street art, and decided that I wanted to make artwork similar in style to what became an obsession and something that I couldn’t get enough of. Twenty years later I am still creating and reinventing myself."