Joe
Crookston
Joe Crookston is a painter, printmaker and musician living on a 200-acre eco-village and CSA Farm in the town of Ithaca, NY. He has lived in Tompkins County for 22 years.
Since 2004, Joe has traveled and explored the Finger Lakes Region of New York, creating art and music that celebrates the small rural towns, natural beauty and the people living in his home state.
In 2006-2008 he was part of a creative action movement culminating in New York State purchasing and preserving the wilderness area of Canadice Lake.
As a long-time New York resident, Joe has grown a deep love for the natural beauty, and rural, glacier-carved landscape of New York. The land, the lakes, the farms, orchards, geology, history and people have become part of him.
“380 Million Years & A Story To Tell”
Taughannock Falls Limestone Lithography & Printmaking
For seven months, artist Joe Crookston mixed & boiled natural inks & dyes using beets, onion skins, turmeric, rust, spirulina & eastern black walnuts to create one of a kind lithography monoprints of the undulating Tully limestone river bed at Taughannock Falls State Park in Trumansburg, NY.
Printmaking in the wild!
Using Loosely woven 4x4 foot muslin fabric he created 13 richly colored & pigmented scroll-like substrate canvasses. Then, in late August 2026, he and a team of 9 community crew-helpers went out into the Taughannock gorge, walked onto the dry riverbed, cleaned areas of limestone, rolled black walnut ink onto the stone & pressed & burnished canvases to make one-of-a-kind lithography print images of the natural ancient limestone markings.
The rock WAS the artist. Instead of Joe creating compositions, he simply allowed the 380 million year old limestone to tell its own story & reveal itself to us!
Joe will be exhibiting 13 of these: 4 foot x 4 foot scrolls at two art exhibitions in late 2026
