Lydia Crouse (b.1995) is a visual artist from Indianapolis currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY.

I visualize figurative dramas through painting and drawing, working across oil, acrylic, watercolor, colored pencil, and charcoal. My own inner monologues script these works—writing becomes a cue, drawings stage fictional narratives, and paintings render them further into speculation and abstraction. Figures navigate states of longing, embarrassment, fear, stubborn hope, and drive while inhabiting landscapes shaped by gesture, color, and light.

Existential humor, naïveté, and nostalgia are symbolized throughout my work. Drawing on the everyday, obnoxious levels of affection and personal contradiction, I subvert familiar dominant myths that privilege certainty, religious doom, hustle culture, and emotional restraint with more generous ones: narratives in which vulnerability, tenderness, confidence, and care can coexist with my anxieties.

My ambition is to conceive a counternarrative in which characters, landscapes, and medium perform together, animating the viewer's curiosity. By constructing scenes of fiction, I set the stage for spectators to consider the absurdity of our endeavors and perhaps the possibility of love on the eve of every antagonism.