Lydia Crouse is a figurative painter from Indianapolis now living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She holds a BFA in painting from the Herron School of Art and Design at IUPUI and an MFA in painting from Parsons School of Design at The New School, where she received the Oscar Kolin MFA Fellowship. Working from writing and drawing toward oil painting, she stages fictional, often absurdist figurative dramas scripted from her own inner monologues, using existential humor and abstraction to explore proximity and the critical imagination of the viewer. Her group exhibitions include shows at The Living Gallery and ZXY Gallery in Bushwick and the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery in Manhattan, and she has been featured in Studio Visit Magazine and Not Real Art.

Lydia works to visualize figurative dramas in oil paint scripted by her inner-monologues. Utilizing her writing as cues she creates drawings to stage fictional narratives. Lydia renders these drawings further into speculation with painting. Her ambition as a painter is to make in order to conceive a counternarrative where the characters, landscape, and medium itself perform with abstraction in hopes of animating the critical imagination and curiosity of the viewer. Lydia continuously draws on existential humor, her own everyday, moments of naïveté, and obnoxious levels of affection in order to subvert dominant myths with better ones. And by finally constructing scenes of fiction she paints to set the stage for any spectator to consider not only the absurdity of our human endeavor, but perhaps, also the possibility of love on the eve of every antagonism.