Ann Craven
Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston
September 5 - 28, 2002
Allston Skirt Gallery presents new paintings by Ann Craven.
Nature beckons in the work of Ann Craven, whose new paintings feature monumental portraits of brightly colored birds and close-up views of big eyed deer painted in lush hues with fresh, expressive strokes. It is nature like we most want it to be, in our favorite memories and fondest hopes -- yet with color at its highest key, and birds appearing in series that both mirror and repeat. Using nature as an almost-rebellious display of subjectivity, these paintings tweak the cheek of pop art, and question the role of subject matter in our current art world climate. As Bill Arning wrote in Time Out New York (1998), "Craven probes the boundary between sophistication and lousy taste in a way that plants her squarely in the same stylistic territory as John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Elizabeth Peyton."
An exceptional colorist, Ann Craven's world of flora and fauna is brought to life in delicious pinks that range from hot to Pepto Bismol, yellows from butter to canary, and blues from sky to sea. Her painted birds are drawn from field guides and naturalists' texts, and are most often faithful to nature; her robins and pied mynahs are realistic in appearance and in pose. Ann Craven sets her creatures against flowery backgrounds that are at once carefully realistic and slightly blurred. These backgrounds are drawn from observed nature -- a three month residency at the Academie des Beaux-Arts and Foundation de Claude Monet at Giverny, France in the summer of 2000 provided Ann Craven with the perfect setting to study and paint the rich variety of flowers and animals found there.
In spite of their subject matter, the overall impression of Craven's paintings is that they are not quite natural. Unexpected scale, unconventional mix of focus/out-of-focus, experiments with repetition and reflection, flatness and three-dimensionality, all give Craven's work a distinctive flavor that removes them from the world of bird watchers. And it is her exceptional paint handling and formal accomplishments that separate her work from the world of the Sunday landscape painter, although she freely admits that this territory is part of her work, as its aim, like Craven's, is to please the eye. Drawing on Gerhard Richter as well as John Audubon, Gustave Courbet as well as kitsch painting on black velvet, Ann Craven looks at artificiality as well as at nature, calling both into question. Still, it is precisely Craven's sensitivity to, and respect for, the natural world -- from her finches and fawns to the orchids, hollyhocks and daisies that sets them against -- that allows her to let emotions interfere, to let the animals come to stand in for the all-too-human experiences that animals often symbolize for us, taking on the characteristics of fragility and innocence, mortality and vulnerability, flirtatiousness and danger, among many others.
Ann Craven's work has been exhibited in New York and throughout the United States, most recently in her current one person exhibition at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert in New York, as well as in group exhibitions at Triple Candie in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. She grew up in the Boston area, and lives and paints in New York City. She is presently teaching in the graduate and undergraduate program at The Museum School of Fine Arts here in Boston.
ALLSTON SKIRT GALLERY
450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA 02118
www.allstonskirt.com
