Eric Drooker

Eric Drooker was born on East End Avenue in 1958 and has lived in Lower Manhattan his whole life. A third generation New Yorker, he has been drawing and painting since earliest childhood. His art has always combined the concrete reality of urban existence with visionary flights of imagination.

After a stint as factory and office worker, he began hustling his artwork on the streets of Greenwich village. Years as a street peddler exposed him to a range of human dramas, injustices, gripes and desires that shaped his critical vision of society.

Drooker's work speaks to the public as directly as possible: on downtown streets, where his posters are ubiquitous, in underground publications like World War 3 Illustrated and The Shadow, progressive mags like The Nation, Spin and The Village Voice, or mainstream rags like The New York Times, Newsweek and The New Yorker.

His first book, Flood! A Novel In Pictures, won the American Book Award in 1994. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Art Speilman called Flood! " a complex, dream-charged vision...of a soulless civilization headed towards the apocalypse. It's a poetic and lyrical novel-told virtually without words...Drooker has discovered the magic of pulling light and life out of an inky sea of darkness."

His second book, Illuminated Poems, is a collaboration with Beat poet Allen Ginsberg who muses, "Drooker's old Poe vision of beauteous deathly reality transcend political hang-up and fix our present American Dreams."

His work can be seen in art galleries across the country as well as on postcards, T-shirts, CDs and book covers.

He feels that art should be affordable to everyone and that "in times of corporate ugliness, rampant fear and social decay, a simple expression of true beauty is a revolutionary act."

Drooker gives frequent lectures and performances across the United States and Europe, combining slide-show projections with spoken word and musical poetry.

Flood! A Novel in Pictures and Illuminated Poems are available in bookstores, or directly from the publisher: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1-800-626-4848, or through Amazon.com

(bio from his third book, "Street Posters and Ballads", Seven Stories Press)

contact: www.drooker.com