Ann Craven @ CMCA, Rockland - Birds We Know

Ann Craven: Birds We Know
Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland
June 29 - October 13, 2019

The Center for Maine Contemporary Art (CMCA) presents a major exhibition of artist ANN CRAVEN’s paintings. The exhibition, Ann Craven: Birds We Know, is the first show of the noted artist’s work in Maine, where she has been a seasonal resident and has been painting for more than 25 years.

Ann Craven is widely known for her lushly colored, mesmerizing portraits of the moon, birds, flowers, and other images, which she revisits in serial fashion, as well as her painted bands of color, which document her process. Ann Craven says, ”My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that’s constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.”  

Birds We Know presents a comprehensive selection of the artist’s work, and is accompanied by an illustrated, hardcover catalog with an essay by Christopher B. Crosman, founding curator, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and former director, Farnsworth Art Museum.

In the essay, Crosman states, “...Ann Craven’s birds, moons, trees, and her stripe and palette paintings all enforce the hard stop our mind and eye make before inexplicable paintings, paintings that affirm an inseparability of beauty, truth and virtue. This is painting at its most authentic and original, at its most memorable and tenderly remarkable.”

Ann Craven began painting in Maine in the early 1990s. First in a borrowed barn near Slab City Road in the mid-coast village of Lincolnville, then from her own barn that she converted to a studio on a farm she purchased nearby. Lincolnville and the surrounding region has harbored artists for decades, beginning in the 1950s when Neil Welliver, Alex Katz, Lois Dodd and other New York-based artists started summering in the area. It was on Lincolnville beach, a small strip of sand anchored by The Lobster Pound restaurant, that Craven painted her first “Moon” painting in 1995. The experience, she says, “gave me my subject matter, I was literally chasing the moon.”

For Ann Craven, painting serial versions of the moon on site was a way to conflate the momentary with the constant. The moon became for her a symbol of time and memory, themes that remain the primary focus of her work. The paintings of birds soon followed, inspired by color-plates found in her Italian grandmother’s vintage ornithology books. Like the moon the birds serve as a touchstone for memory, each repetition of the image a revisiting of a moment, a recalling of loved ones.

In 2008, Ann Craven moved from Lincolnville to an historic house on the banks of the St. George River in Cushing. The property had an old garden shed that became her new studio and, importantly, a majestic purple beech tree hugging the shore. This 100-plus-year-old tree is Craven’s newest motif. “It reminded me of the moon,” she says, “because it was round and because of all the life it had seen. Families coming and going, life lived. Like the moon it’s a constant that ebbs and flows, but the opposite of the moon in that it changes with the day and becomes a silhouette against the sunset.”

Ann Craven is a diarist, each of her paintings is inscribed with the date and time of its making, and she meticulously inventories and records each year’s work. Recently she began exhibiting her extensive series of Untitled (Palettes), ranging from 1999 to present. Painting wet on wet in oils, she mixes her colors on light-duty pre-stretched canvases. “The Palettes are my indexed color inventory,” she says. “They are a way for me to hold on to what I just painted—a moon or flower or bird.”

In addition to numerous group exhibitions worldwide, Ann Craven had her first retrospective, titled TIME, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France, in 2014. Other recent major solo exhibitions include Promise (Birds for Chicago), Shane Campbell, Chicago, 2019; Sunset Moon, Karma, NY, 2018; Snowbirds, Nina Johnson, Miami, 2018; Animals 1999-2017, Southard Reid, London, 2017; Hello, Hello, Hello, Maccarone, NY, 2016, and Ann Craven, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles, 2014.

Her work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Modern Painters, Art News, LA Times, Art in America, Artforum, Flash Art, The New Yorker, Frieze, among others. Ann Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and private collections worldwide.

Ann Craven: Birds We Know is made possible at CMCA with support from Max Mara, and individual donors.

CENTER FOR MAINE CONTEMPORARY ART - CMCA
21 Winter Street, Rockland, ME 04841
cmcanow.org

Ann Craven, Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston - New Paintings Exhibition

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