Ray Cronin

Ray Cronin is a Nova Scotia-based writer and curator. Between 2011 and 2015 he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as both curator and director. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award.
Cronin has written on visual arts for magazines and newspapers for over two decades and is presently the visual arts blogger for Halifax Magazine. He is also the author of Our Maud: The Art, Life and Legacy of Maud Lewis and the ebook Alex Colville: Art and Life.

Link to author web site (external page)



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Maud Lewis: Creating an Icon
Ray Cronin

2020 / Canadian Art, Biography Artists / $21.95
9781554472062 / Trade paper / 64 pp


A Gaspereau Field Guide to Canadian Artists: No. 5

More than any other Canadian artist, Nova Scotian folk artist Maud Lewis (1901–70) is defined as much by her life as by her art. While her story was one of poverty, hardship, physical disability, and chronic pain, it was also one of triumph of character and creativity over circumstance. Catering primarily to the tourists who drove past her tiny house each summer, Lewis’s bright, primitive paintings of oxen, cats, boats, and rural scenes were both a response and an invitation to nostalgia. In this essay, Ray Cronin explores how Lewis’s style and imagery became iconic, synonymous both with the way Nova Scotians’s viewed themselves and the way the province would promote itself to the world.



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Other Books by this Author

Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine
Ray Cronin

2022 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $22.95 CAN
9781554472468 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Colleen Wolstenholme: Complications
Ray Cronin

2021 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554472147 / Trade paper / 64 pp
John Greer: Hard Thought
Ray Cronin

2019 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471980 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Alex Colville: A Rebellious Mind
Ray Cronin

2019 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471881 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Gerald Ferguson: Thinking of Painting
Ray Cronin

2018 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471874 / Trade paper / 64 pp
Mary Pratt: Still Light
Ray Cronin

2018 / Canadian Art Biography, Artists / $21.95 CAN
9781554471805 / Trade paper / 64 pp

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