Artistic practice
Surf works
As a teenager, Crotty often sketched waves and surfers in the margins of his schoolwork while imagining surfing. By the early 1990s, after graduate school and a move to Los Angeles, he began turning these sketches into formal fine art. Using a ballpoint pen, Crotty rendered these imagined surfing scenes in structured, minimal, modernist grids. Within each box, he drew multiple small, frenetic shorthand figures of surfers in various stages of catching waves, creating a distinctive contrast between the rigid grid and the gestures of the artist’s hand.
Astronomical works
As a member of his local astronomy club during his youth, Crotty was fascinated by the night sky. In 1994, he rekindled that interest by building his own observatory in the Santa Monica Mountains, which he called the Solstice Peak Observatory; it housed a ten-inch f/8 Newtonian reflector telescope in a small, corrugated metal shed. Unfortunately, the observatory burned down during a Southern California wildfire in 2007. During that time, Crotty began making empirical scientific illustrations sketched directly from his telescope eyepiece. Later, the Journal of the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers published these drawings, which emphasize celestial details that standard astronomical photography often can’t capture.
Archiving his visual observations and reimagining their format, Crotty employed the structural technique of his earlier minimalist surf-culture drawings; he filled large sheets of paper with "tight grids" and mapped the multiple states of the planets he had observed. This led to an interest in creating dark circular drawings of fields textured with crosshatched strokes of blue-black ballpoint pen of the celestial bodies. These circular frames mirrored the perspective of looking through a telescope's viewfinder.
By 2000, Crotty realized that two-dimensional pictorial conventions of his drawings were a constraint, as the ski is an expansive, 3D space rather than a flat backdrop; he decided to push his paper drawings into the room and create suspended globes. He had the core sphere fabricated in Lucite, then had conservators professionally cover it with archival paper, which he would draw on. The finished works, ranging from 8 to 72 inches (20 to 180 centimeters) in diameter, hang from the ceiling at eye level; they resemble a small galaxy of planets, while blending minimal sculpture with drawing.
In 2001, Crotty began compiling his detailed drawings into massive, handmade books that mimic the sequential and interactive nature of stargazing and mapping. They featured his illustrations of the night sky, stars, constellations, planetary landscapes, and coastal rock formations in blue-black ballpoint pen and watercolor washes. He presented them as gallery installations: oversized volumes several feet long, laid flat on large museum-style tables.
