ARTIST GREG SIMKINS IS AN INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED
MAKER OF WORLDS. BUT HIS WORK IS DRAWN FROM THE
THE FANTASTICAL REALMS OF THE SOUTH BAY
Words By
RACHEL REEVES
Photos By
BRENT BROZA
Greg Simkins, the artist internationally known as
CRAOLA, lives two blocks from the house he grew
up in. Down the street are his middle school, his high
school, and the concrete drainage channel where,
at sixteen, he squeezed through a locked gate with a
backpack full of spray paint from his dad’s garage and
tagged his first wall.
That was 1992, before the sold-out gallery shows,
museum exhibits, art books, and worldwide repute as
a pop surrealist painter. He was a junior at South High
then, by his own account a shy, nerdy kid who drew
during class. Someone in his social studies class had
seen his sketchbook and given him a copy of Subway
Art, a 1984 book filled with photographs of graffiti art
on New York City subway cars.
“It blew my mind,” Simkins said. “It just kind of
opened up a whole new arena of what could be done.”
He went back to the concrete the next weekend, and
the next. People started to talk about the CRAOLA
tag. That was before social media and cellphones, when
word of mouth traveled organically, in places like high
school classrooms and skateboarding spots.
Most of the graffiti writers Simkins met in those
early days were painting letters. He added cartoonish
characters to his letters: superheroes, rabbits, anthropomorphized fruit.
This was a natural choice
for Simkins, who began drawing cartoons when he was
three. His mom would unfurl a roll of butcher paper
across the kitchen table, and he would watch G.I. Joe
and Star Wars and draw what he saw. He calls cartoons
his first art teacher.
Soon, Simkins was running with various graffiti
crews – CBS, WAI, LORDs, SCI – that were painting
the overpasses and oil drums of the L.A. harbor area.
They became his teachers, and Los Angeles became his
canvas.
Graffiti, like skateboarding and punk rock, offered
him friendships that would open the doors leading to
the rest of his life. “Everybody in the South Bay, we
all kind of mingled together, and there were all these
people that kind of pushed me in different directions,”
Simkins said. Through singing in a punk band, he met
and made art for bands that would become fixtures of
American punk. Among other gigs, he drew the cover
of Time Is the Distance, Deviates’ beloved sophomore
album, and designed Warped Tour merchandise for
Pennywise.
After high school, while he was attending El
Camino Community College, Simkins hung out
daily at Torrance Beach with a motley crew of surfers,
skateboarders, and punk rockers. It was there that he
first laid eyes on a pretty girl named Jennifer. He was in
a relationship and so was she; they made only a polite
acquaintance.
Simkins later transferred to Cal State Long Beach to
study studio art. The following year, Jenn went there too, to
pursue a communications degree. Now both
were single. Jenn and a mutual friend plotted that the
friend would call Simkins to ask what he thought of
Jenn, and she would be listening on the other line,
unannounced. She thus on the sly discovered he was
very much interested in her.
“I wanted to get his temperature. So embarrassing,”
Jenn recalled, laughing.
Simkins approached her one day at The Nugget, the
school’s food court, and asked her out.
“I said yes because, you know, I had the intel that he
was interested,” she said. “Me not being a risk taker, I
had the confidence to go, okay, yeah, he’s into it.”
The marketing major who did her due diligence
before she said yes to a date was business-minded in a
way that would later amplify and sustain Simkins’ art
career. She would become the CEO of Greg CRAOLA
Simkins Inc. and the mother of the artist’s children,
whom Simkins describes as his most interesting
collaboration yet.
“We’ve been inseparable ever since,” he said.
After college, Simkins waited tables at the Chili’s
across the street from Del Amo Mall. He did the odd
T-shirt design and thought a lot about how he could
turn art into a living. A few writers from CBS, one of
the graffiti crews he painted with, worked downtown at
JNCO Jeans, the brand known for its super-wide-leg
jeans. The company was looking for graphic designers.
Simkins applied. He got the job.
That put him at an illustration table with some of the
graffiti writers he admired most: Axis, Kofie, Epik, Yeloe,Pryer.
It also taught him how to use software to design
graphics. Later, when a friend left JNCO to work for
Treyarch, Simkins begged him for an interview.
Treyarch – an El Segundo video game company that
would later be purchased by Activision, publisher of
the popular game Call of Duty – was advertising for
artists to design graffiti-covered urbanscapes for Tony
Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 for Xbox, then a brand-new game
console.
“I’m like, I’m your guy,” Simkins said. At Treyarch,
he built worlds for Kelly Slater’s Pro Surfer, the never-
released Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder 2, and three
Path Of The Sea
30”x20”
acrylic on canvas
BY CRAOLA
Spider-Man games. He would work until ten or eleven
at night and then paint canvases after that, until three
or four in the morning. He’d take his paintings to work,
where colleagues helped him photograph and advertise
them on Friendster and Myspace. Soon he was selling
paintings to customers as far away as Germany.
One day in 2005, Simkins got two emails that
changed everything: one from Gallery 1988 in Los
Angeles, one from Upper Playground in San Francisco.
Both invited him to show some work. In later meetings,
the gallerists who sent those emails asked why he wasn’t
painting for a living.
“I’m like, I don’t know if you can do this for a living,”
he said. “They’re like, of course you can. … Just try it.
See what happens.”
By then, Simkins and Jenn lived in an apartment
near the Redondo Beach Dog Park on 190th. She was
climbing the corporate ladder, working as the national
marketing manager for U.S. HealthWorks, a major
network of healthcare centers. They decided Simkins
would quit his job to focus on art.
“I would just paint all day, take a break, go to the
dog park, watch the dogs, come back, and paint, paint,
paint, paint,” he said. “And it just snowballed. And
that’s just all I’ve done since.”
As requests for paintings rolled in, they decided she
would quit her job, too, to focus on building the Greg
CRAOLA Simkins Inc. brand.
“Kitron” • 30”x20” • acrylic on canvas • BY CRAOLA
“We really had to make a big leap,” Jenn said. “It
took so much faith.”
She became Simkins’ “filter,” she said. Anyone who
wanted his work went through her.
“I feel like a lot of artists that I know, just because they
enjoy doing [art], they don’t put a value on it,” Jenn
said. “So I was always very protective of his time and
his talents.”
She handled correspondence and contracts. She
drove the diversification of the business: prints,
merchandise, vinyl toys, art books. She managed
licensing partnerships with Disney, Marvel, and Mattel.
With Jenn’s mentality, which her current employer
described in a recent LinkedIn post as “strategic” and
“growth-focused,” Simkins’ art business boomed.
“If it wasn’t for her and her beautiful mind,” he said,
“I’d still be sitting behind a desk.”
Soon Simkins was selling out gallery shows, hanging
work in museums, and landing commissions for art
collectors all over the world. His paintings appeared
on the covers of popular art magazines: Juxtapoz, Hi-
Frutose and American Art Collector. Four of his five
“Try To Fit In” • 72”x72” • acrylic on canvas • BY CRAOLA
books sold out. More than 213,000 people subscribed
to his YouTube channel to watch time-lapse videos of
him painting.
The graffiti artist who spray-painted cartoons on
concrete turned into a serious fine artist in the canon
of pop surrealism, a genre that blends pop culture and
the otherworldly imagery of surrealism.
“If there was ever a prototypical balance of highbrow
and lowbrow art merging together with a seamless flow,
Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins would be the quintessential
example of that confluence,” explained a writer for
Mindzai, an online marketplace for artists.
The genre was another natural destination for
Simkins, who had always been drawn to the uncanny.
“From my first exposure to this world, I felt like I
was always in it without even knowing it,” he told a
writer at Spanish magazine Staf. As a child, he loved
worlds that, like dreams, mimic reality but operate
according to different rules: Narnia, where animals
talk; Wonderland, where a vanishing cat leaves his grin
behind; the Lands Beyond in The Phantom Toll Booth,
where words, numbers, and sounds are things you can
touch.
“Good Knight” •72”x96” • acrylic on canvas • By CRAOLA
He found one of these weird, fantastical worlds at
Redondo Fun Factory, the arcade tucked beneath the
Redondo Beach Pier from 1972 until 2019. If you
grew up in the South Bay in those years like I did, you
probably went there to play arcade games and ride the
tilt-a-whirl and study the kitsch: a piñata witch, a life-
sized gold Buddha, clogs hanging from the ceiling, a
Orceratops by CRAOLA
taxidermized reindeer wearing a straw hat. In that
dingy, seedy, carnivalesque atmosphere, familiar items
were recast as strange, simply because their togetherness
made no sense.
“That was just like, whoa, what is this place?” Simkins
recalled. “It’s kind of like Alice falling down the rabbit
hole, and all the cool stuff she would see along the way
to Wonderland. It’s how it felt, like you were going to
another world when you went there.”
This is precisely the feeling he wants his paintings to
evoke. Their subject matter is surreal: a piano walking
on crab legs, a duck with the face of a flower, a bird
sailing through the air in a teacup. In one painting,
an octopus with a lime for a head clutches a beer. In
another, a six-eyed rabbit poses with a lobster and a
peeled orange. Every painting, full of competing
details, is an experience, an invitation to look longer.
Simkins described his style to a PBS reporter as “Dalí
plus Disney plus Wild Kingdom plus antiques.”
All of this chaos is rendered with technical precision.
Simkins’ paintings demonstrate a meticulousness and
a mastery of light and shadow that reflect his careful
study of realist painters such as Rembrandt and da
Vinci.
“If you paint things realistically that are weird,
people kind of go, oh, that makes sense now, instead of
it just being super cartoony,” Simkins said. “I try to put
some realism into it so that you feel like it’s living and
breathing, like it was maybe, you know, a captured still
life of something that actually happened or exists.”
He developed the characters he painted. He gave
them narrative. He built them a world he named The
Outside. Isaac, his 19-year-old son, remembers hearing
stories about The Outside every day when he was a kid.
Some of Simkins’ characters came to life in a 2016
stop-motion film called “I’m Scared,” directed by Pete Levin,
Sidewalk Ends by CRAOLA
produced by Dan Levy, and scored by Mark
Hoppus of Blink-182. The short film features eight-
year-old Ralf warning his younger brother to beware
the weird and monstrous creatures that keep appearing
in their bedroom at night. It showed in festivals all over
the world, winning best animated film at two.
“I’m Scared” is an ode to imagination inspired by
and developed for Simkins’ two sons, Isaac and Everett,
who were nine and four when it was released.
“This whole world, you know, is basically a gift or
a love letter to them,” Simkins said. Their childlike
imaginations encouraged his. Their astonishment
as they discovered the marvels of being alive – trees,
birdnests, water slides – kept him paying attention.
Attention like this is rewarded by a sense of awe at
the wondrous unfolding of the world, which Simkins
understands as the work of God.
“I think it’s just mind-blowing, just the beauty that’s
out there in the world,” he said. “I’m working on a big
landscape painting as a background for a bigger piece
right now, and I’m just looking through photos of all
of these beautiful sunsets and cloudscapes and I’m like,
wow, it’s like, you get it. He paints this every single
day.”
Simkins aligns with C.S. Lewis, one of the writers
Soda Pop by CRAOLA
whose worldmaking (such as in “The Chronicles
of Narnia”) inspires him, on this philosophy: that
to imagine and create is to echo the original act of
creation, and that this God-given capacity is both a gift
and a responsibility.
After more than two decades of painting for a living,
the artist still does not experience art as labor. He
fills up sketchbooks when he’s waiting for his kids at
wrestling practice or the skate park. He’s in the studio
from nine to six daily, painting to a soundtrack of
punk rock, classical music, and songs from old cartoon
movies. Recently he got so lost in a painting that when
he looked at the clock, seven hours had passed.
Simkins paints in his backyard, a quarter of a mile
from the house where cartoons taught him how to
draw. He and Jenn walked into this backyard when
their boys were little and discovered a zip line over a
fire pit, an in-ground trampoline, and a ready-made art
studio.
“I was like, oh my gosh,” Simkins said, “I guess we’re
moving in here.”
A family with young kids lived behind the house.
Daily, Isaac would climb the wall in the backyard and
call out for his friend to come play with toys and watch
cartoons. Later, neighbor kids built a quarter pipe and
“Garfman” by CRAOLA behind Paul’s Photo in Torrance
they’d all skate until sundown.
Isaac and Everett went to the same schools their
parents did: Seaside Elementary, Calle Mayor Middle
School, South High. Isaac, who recently graduated
from South, worked at Jack’s Pizza, where Simkins
worked when he was in high school.
“The South Bay just became this neighborhood of,
like, skateboarding and art and fun that it did for me
growing up,” Simkins said. “It happened for them too.”
It happened because he was intentional about it
happening. During the pandemic, when most people
remained indoors, Simkins took his boys outside every
day to play frisbee or go skateboarding. He imparted to
them what the South Bay had given him. In homage
to local punk rock, Isaac has a Black Flag tattoo on his
left thigh.
CRAOLA was already a South Bay legend when
I was in high school at Redondo in the early 2000s.
While I was thinking about this story, I called an old
friend, Mirko Antich, an artist who’s now a creative
director at Vans.
He told me Simkins was one of the few artists who
changed the direction of his life. Antich discovered
CRAOLA as a teenager, by way of Deviates’ album
cover, and soon realized the artist had been all around
him: in the worlds built into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
2 and spray-painted walls throughout L.A. Without
words, Simkins taught him what was possible.
In high school, Antich reached out to Simkins,
who invited him to the studio. During that visit, the
gap between the legend and the person closed. Antich
saw another South Bay kid who, like him, was into
skateboarding and punk rock and graffiti and tattoos.
“CRAOLA is larger than life,” he said, “and Greg is
just, like, a regular guy.”
With this characteristic humility, Simkins attributes
his career as a full-time fine artist — extraordinary in
its reach, fan loyalty, and longevity, particularly in a
time when there are fewer people than ever making a
living selling art — to a combination of imagination,
work ethic, his wife’s willingness to support his dreams,
and the people he connected with along the way.
“I wouldn’t have met all these people and had all
these adventures,” he said, “if I hadn’t been here in the
South Bay.”
Those adventures have by now achieved an epic
reach. Art critics and his client list speak to just how
wide a world he made. Simkins has painted for Disney,
Converse, Vans, Pearl Jam, Linkin Park, The Used,
and Blink-182. His paintings hung on the late Robin
Williams’ wall. They hang in the homes of singer Fergie
and actor Josh Duhamel, Nike’s CEO Mark Parker, and
actor Jason Biggs and actress Jenny Biggs-Mollen. Nick
Cassavetes, who directed such popular films as “The
Notebook” and “Alpha Dog”, wrote the foreword to
“The Outside”, one of Simkins’ art books. Five hundred
people lined up outside Merry Karnowsky Gallery to
purchase the book when it was published in 2013.
Cassavetes wrote: “From the first time I ever saw his
work, Greg Simkins’ paintings have always hit me on a
gut level. You get drawn through the portal by the sheer
beauty and delicate techniques of his work. But it’s the
narrative, the complex and hallucinatory clarity of the
defined worlds that he creates, the hybrid characters,
each with their own detailed history, that hits you on
an emotional level. It’s like taking a trip back to your
childhood, only weirder and more dangerous. In this
respect, I have the highest level of appreciation for Mr.
Simkins. I find myself staring at his paintings for hours
at a time. The characters become my friends, and the
longer they live with me, the more understanding I
have for them. All in all, he’s the stone cold nuts. Any
time you’re lucky enough just to see one of Craola’s
paintings, you are in for a truly transporting experience.
One that is gorgeous, genuine and deeply personal,
the artist presenting a pure experiential journey, with
enough stories and mysteries swirling through the
paint to make your head spin. The impact is invariably
startling, but the success of these journeys is that they
are always 100% authentic. And that’s because Greg
Simkins doesn’t have a false bone in his body, and he
delivers his dreams wrapped in candy and smoke.”
To purchase art or learn more about Simkins’
work, visit gregsimkinsart.com.