How The Work Is Made
Where It Started
Cronin made things before he made art.
The first studio was his father's woodshop — scraps off the floor, cut into toy boats, keychains, whatever the bench could give him. The instinct to take raw material and turn it into something purposeful arrived years before the vocabulary did.
By the time the work had a name on it, the reflex was already old. Three decades later, it still drives the practice. The medium has changed many times. The making hasn't.
The Paint
Cronin paints with Rust-Oleum.
The choice started as a constraint. He wanted to paint at scale, and the art-store tubes weren't built for it. So he reached for the can on the hardware store shelf — the same paint a contractor uses to keep machinery from rusting.
The workaround became a position. Rust-Oleum pours thick. It sits on the surface in a way oil paint doesn't. The high-gloss finish reads almost manufactured — and that's the point. The same gloss lives on a beer can, a vintage Schwinn, a roadside sign, a tractor — exactly the world the work draws from. The material doesn't sit at a remove from the subject. It comes from the same shelf.
Then the brush goes through it, and the hand shows up. Manufactured surface, human stroke. That tension is one of the engines of the work.
Through The Years
The vocabulary has stayed the same for decades.
Color used like signal, not decoration. Composition framed deliberately, often with a black border that reads like a film still. Recurring images that move across the work like cast members — stars, hearts, rainbows, bunnies, geese, beer labels, circled words. Text behaving like signage: a title, a frame, a punchline.
What's expanded is what the vocabulary lives on.
Murals in Wynwood and New York City. A painted silo at a Hudson Valley distillery. A traveling privacy booth that helps women self-screen for cancer. Found wood and metal turned into wall sculpture. A new series cut from a deconstructed home heating oil tank. Lawn signs along county roadways reminding drivers to look out for cyclists.
The work was never going to stay on the wall.
Where It Is Now
Three decades in, the work is doing what it was always going to do.
It doesn't need a wall label. It doesn't need a translator. It puts a clear visual statement in front of the viewer and waits. The rest is the viewer's part.
Cronin paints because the impulse hasn't let up. Everything else grew out of that.
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